On density–flow relationships during crowd evacuation

Abstract

Traffic and pedestrian dynamics communities often use a standard qualitative classification, namely, level of service (LoS), to describe the relationship between the crowd flow and crowd density in an environment. However, this classification has not yet been rigorously studied in the application of synthetic crowds, which are derived using a variety of approaches and may model certain behaviors better than others. Although synthetic crowds can be simulated to extrapolate crowd flow for rigorous quantitative analysis, these may be at odds with the qualitative LoS. In order to successfully use computer-assisted design, it is important to have sound quantitative metrics as the basis for analysis and optimization. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical analysis of LoS for synthetic crowds. Using established crowd simulation techniques, we quantify the relation between crowd density and crowd flow for evacuation scenarios across different simulators to explore conformity to qualitative LoS classifications. Following this study, we perform environment optimization experiments under various LoS conditions. Finally, we test the generality of optimizing under these LoS conditions. Our results motivate the need for further study, using real and synthetic crowd datasets across representative environment benchmarks.

Gamification of Crowd-Driven Environment Design

“…The Unity R Mecanim system, in tandem with a modified version of the ADAPT system [17], handles animation of each bipedal humanoid character model. Additionally, ORCA has been shown to produce generalizable results in crowdbased environment optimization and reproduce "human-like" fundamental diagrams in common egress scenarios [1].…”

“…Research efforts have focused on the automatic and user-inthe-loop generation of optimal architectural design solutions with respect to design criteria [4], [5], [6], [7]. Furthermore, an active area of research has been utilizing crowd simulation as a dynamic source for human-centric design criteria and objective analysis [1], [2]. Work has also shown that the user-in-theloop approach can be made real-time and highly interactive by training neural networks to statically estimate crowd flow in environments [3].…”

“…Additionally, scenarios in which design choices impact the people using them or are critical, such as egress and evacuations, are difficult to predictively explore. To address this problem space, synthetic crowds are used as dynamic analytical resources [1], [2]. Synthetic crowds afford low-cost, large scale, and flexible testing of designs, which enables optimization-based approaches that can automatically produce solutions to said design problems.…”

Interactive spatial analytics for human-aware building design

“…Similar to vehicular traffic, pedestrian dynamics have also been studied in the context of environment traffic [Fruin 1971]. In this study, we define crowd flow as rate at which all the agents complete their final goals [Berseth et al 2015;Haworth et al 2017a].…”

Improving competitive evacuations with a vestibule structure designed from panel-like obstacles

“…It is worth mentioning that the link between the flow-density relation and pedestrian evacuations in the presence of obstacles is almost unexplored [40].…”