A simulation as a service methodology with application for crowd modeling, simulation and visualization

Abstract

Crowd modeling and simulation (M&S) has been used to support the analysis of the behavior of crowds, in order to predict the impact of pedestrian movement and to test design alternatives. In recent years, crowd M&S has become more complex, and new technologies such as CAD (computer-aided design) and BIM (building information modeling) authoring tools are being used to support the process. There are challenges in adopting these technologies due to the lack of automation and integration of these tools for crowd M&S. We propose a method based on a distributed architecture with simulation in the cloud, and composition using workflows. In particular, we adopt a model-driven engineering approach to extract data from CAD/BIM authoring tools, Cell-DEVS theory for crowd modeling, simulation as a service to execute simulation remotely, and three-dimensional visualization. Finally, we present a case study for crowd evacuation, discussing the advantages of the proposed architecture. We show the advantages obtained when using distributed deployment, simulation-based design and collaborative development and we discuss how this facilitates the crowd behavior study and improves reusability in crowd M&S.

Advanced Cell-DEVS modeling applications: a legacy of Norbert Giambiasi

“…In this section, we show a Cell-DEVS model that simulates the behavior of individuals moving through a 3D object representing a building, as presented elsewhere. 30,34,52 As can be seen in Figure 13, the building has two floors connected by stairs. If we build this model using a traditional CA, we need to consider that we have a single state variable per cell.…”

“…As we explained, the blue cells represent visitors (light blue cells are waiting visitors, and green cells are destination cells). We conducted various studies, presented by Wang and Wainer, 52 in which we analyzed the impact of door location/stairs for occupancy. When we changed the entrance positions, there was a small change in terms of building occupancy, and no conflicts between individuals.…”

Social Interaction in Pedestrian Evacuation: a Cellular Discrete Event Simulation Approach

“…In Cell-DEVS, each cell is defined as an atomic DEVS model; an atomic Cell-DEVS model is a coupled DEVS model. In recent years, a series of Cell-DEVS models have been used in the field of crowd behavior (Wang et al 2012, Wang and Wainer 2015, Al-Habashna and Wainer 2016. They took into consideration random movement (port movement and variable pathway) and varied speed of the crowd (hotzone variable), and introduced a technology which abstracts the building information data (standard IFCs) into the crowd modeling (layout variable), combining both the building information and pedestrian evacuation movement.…”

Densifying the Sparse Cloud SimSaaS: The need of a Synergy among Agent-directed Simulation, SimSaaS and HLA

“…Nevertheless, they are wide concerning the domains of application. It is possible to see works in the biomedical domain (Sawicki et al, 2012), in crowd and pedestrian field (Wang and Wainer, 2015) as well as works regarding ontology learning (Wang and Wainer, 2014), traffic and transportation (Härri et al, 2010), scheduling parallel discrete event simulation jobs (Liu et al, 2012a) and a cloud simulation in manufacturing (Taylor et al, 2014a), just to cite some.…”