Modelling And Simulation Of Movements And Behaviours In Large Crowd Using Cellular Automata.

Kumpulan ramai (crowd) adalah satu daripada fenomena yang lumrah dalam kehidupan kita. Reka bentuk bangunan dan tempat-tempat awam hendaklah menjamin tahap keselamatan minimum yang diperlukan serta keselesaan terhadap kesesakan orang ramai. Crowds are one of the ubiquitous phenomena in our life. Design of buildings and public places should therefore guarantee a minimum level of safety, comfort and throughput for the crowd

Agent-Based Simulation Of Crowd At The Tawaf Area.

Every year during the Hajj season there is a concentration of more than two million people within the vicinity of the Masjid Al-Haram. Congested areas, such as the tawaf,, may reach beyond a safe level of four people per square meter during this peak period. The Tawaf area together with the Ottoman construction is able to accommodate up to 72,000 people (in a praying position). Simulation of the movement and behavior of such a huge crowd can be useful in managing this important event. One of the recent trends in modeling and simulation is the agent technology which has been used to model and simulate various phenomenon such as the study of land use, infectious disease modeling, economic and business study, urban dynamic and also pedestrian modeling. In this paper we use multi-agent based method to simulate the crowd at the Tawaf area. We present the architecture of the software platform which implements our proposed model and briefly report our early experience in using- Repast J which is an agent-based simulation toolkit to model the crowd at the area

System Issues in Multi-agent Simulation of Large Crowds

Crowd simulation is a complex and challenging domain. Crowds demonstrate many complex behaviours and are consequently difficult to model for realistic simulation systems. Analyzing crowd dynamics has been an active area of research and efforts have been made to develop models to explain crowd behaviour. In this paper we describe an agent based simulation of crowds, based on a continuous field force model. Our simulation can handle movement of crowds over complex terrains and we have been able to simulate scenarios like clogging of exits during emergency evacuation situations. The focus of this paper, however, is on the scalability issues for such a multi-agent based crowd simulation system. We believe that scalability is an important criterion for rescue simulation systems. To realistically model a disaster scenario for a large city, the system should ideally scale up to accommodate hundreds of thousands of agents. We discuss the attempts made so far to meet this challenge, and try to identify the architectural and system constraints that limit scalability. Thereafter we propose a novel technique which could be used to richly simulate huge crowds

Modeling Environmental Operative Elements in Agent-Based Pedestrian Simulation

Models for pedestrian simulation are employed on a day-to-day basis for supporting the design and planning of the built environment in normal and evacuation situations. One of the aspects that are least investigated in the community, probably because it is considered closer to technology transfer than to research, is the modelling of operational elements of the simulated environment. The present paper briefly describes an agent-based approach to the representation of operative elements of the environment with particular attention to the mechanisms of interaction between these active objects and pedestrians

Evaluation Of Existing Software For Simulating Of Crowd At Masjid Al-Haram,

Crowd simulation has played an important role in solving situations such as building evacuation, crowd congestion, and pedestrian analysis. In order to improve the crowd congestion problem within and the surrounding area of the Masjid Al-Haram, we need a tool which could reproduce specific scenarios and study the possible controls that could ease the problem. This paper explains the criteria to be considered in evaluating the crowd simulation software for the Masjid Al-Haram under both, normal and emergency situations. Our study has led us to the most suitable software package that meets our requirements. We have also identified the main features that we should (later) incorporate in our own design of the simulation system of the Masjid Al-Haram

Local movement: agent-based models of pedestrian flows

Modelling movement within the built environment has hitherto been focused on rather coarse spatial scales where the emphasis has been upon simulating flows of traffic between origins and destinations. Models of pedestrian movement have been sporadic, based largely on finding statistical relationships between volumes and the accessibility of streets, with no sustained efforts at improving such theories. The development of object-orientated computing and agent-based models which have followed in this wake, promise to change this picture radically. It is now possible to develop models simulating the geometric motion of individual agents in small-scale environments using theories of traffic flow to underpin their logic. In this paper, we outline such a model which we adapt to simulate flows of pedestrians between fixed points of entry - gateways - into complex environments such as city centres, and points of attraction based on the location of retail and leisure facilities which represent the focus of such movements. The model simulates the movement of each individual in terms of five components; these are based on motion in the direction of the most attractive locations, forward movement, the avoidance of local geometric obstacles, thresholds which constrain congestion, and movement which is influenced by those already moving towards various locations. The model has elements which enable walkers to self-organise as well as learn from their geometric experiences so far. We first outline the structure of the model, present a computable form, and illustrate how it can be programmed as a variant of cellular automata. We illustrate it using three examples: its application to an idealised mall where we show how two key components - local navigation of obstacles and movement towards points of global locational attraction - can be parameterised, an application to the more complex town centre of Wolverhampton (in the UK West Midlands) where the paths of individual walkers are used to explore the veracity of the model, and finally it application to the Tate Gallery complex in central London where the focus is on calibrating the model by letting individual agents learn from their experience of walking within the environment

Simulating Behaviours to Face up an Emergency Evacuation

Computer based models describing pedestrian behavior in an emergency evacuation play a vital role in the development of active strategies that minimize the evacuation time when a closed area must be evacuated. The reference model has a hybrid structure where the dynamics of fire and smoke propagation are modeled by means of Cellular Automata and for simulating people's behavior we are using Intelligent Agents. The model consists of two sub-models, called environmental and pedestrian ones. As part of the pedestrian model, this paper concentrates in a methodology that is able to model some of the frequently observed human?s behaviors in evacuation exercises. Each agent will perceive what is happening around, select the options that exist in that context and then it makes a decision that will reflect its ability to cope with an emergency evacuation, called in this work, behavior. We also developed simple exercises where the model is applied to the simulation of an evacuation due to a potential hazard, such as fire, smoke or some kind of collapse.Fil: Tissera, Pablo Cristian. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico Matemáticas y Naturales. Departamento de Informática. Laboratorio Investigación y Desarrollo En Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Castro, Alicia. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico Matemáticas y Naturales. Departamento de Informática. Laboratorio Investigación y Desarrollo En Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Printista, Alicia Marcela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico San Luis; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Físico Matemáticas y Naturales. Departamento de Informática. Laboratorio Investigación y Desarrollo en Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Luque, Emilio. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona; Españ