Hybrid Techniques for Pedestrian Simulations

Abstract

There exist multiple models for pedestrian simulations. Cell based models are easy to understand, fast, but consume a lot of memory once the scenario becomes larger. In models based on continuous space, which need almost no memory at all, however, the CPU becomes the bottleneck soon.In our project "Planning with Virtual Alpine Landscapes and Autonomous Agents", we simulate an area of 150 square kilometers, with more than thousand agents for one week. Every agent is able to move freely, adapt to the environment and make decisions during run time. This decisions are based on perception and communication with other agents.This requires a simulation model that is fast and still fits into main memory of a typical workstation. We combined the advantages of both approaches into a hybrid model. This model exploits some of the special properties of the area.• Hikers tend to walk on trails. It is possible to fit a coordinate system on a graph of these trails. Using this coordinate system, a continuous simulation is possible.• Obstacles like houses, trees, or rivers influence the route choice of hikers. We developed an algorithm which adds additional nodes to the exiting graph for each obstacle. The hiker is not only able to walk around the obstacles. but also to take the path length into account during trip planning.• Paths in the Alps are not like streets, their walkability differs a lot. The speed of the hikers is influenced by the quality of the trail. We added a grid known from cell based simulations, which allows us to control the speed of the hikers. Parts of this grid are dynamically loaded as needed.This paper will present an overview over this hybrid system, and some performance results.

On Computational Ecosystems in Media Arts

“…These are popular due to their flexibility. Examples of MAS in crowds include Batty, Christian et al and Tomaya et al's work on pedestrian simulations [34,102,239]. These share the fact that agents incorporate some of the properties described in the previous categories: forms of attraction and repulsion generated by other individuals and some points of reference in the environment.…”

Large Scale Microscopic Evacuation Simulation

“…The improvement of the behavioral model (e.g. herd behavior [5] modified for large-scale scenarios [16]) could also be a topic of future work.…”

A proposed pedestrian waiting-time model for improving space–time use efficiency in stadium evacuation scenarios

“…Agent-based simulation approach is an important technique in modelling the interactions, decision-makings, and status of pedestrians. This approach has been employed by several important pedestrian dynamics studies including Adamatzky's work (2005) [1] on characterizing spaceetime dynamics of crowd-minds using an agent-based model [5] and Wą s's review (2009) [54] on the characteristics of some pedestrians agentbased models including DijkstraeTimmermanseJessurunmodel [11], Alpsim [16], Social Distances Model [53], SBBPedis [27], Dynamics Navigation [48], Situated Cellular Agents [40].…”