Towards accelerated agent-based crowd simulation for Hajj and Umrah

Abstract

There are many scientific applications ranging from weather prediction to oil and gas exploration that requires high-performance computing. It aids industries and researchers to enrich further their advancements. With the advent of general purpose computing over GPUs, most of the applications above are shifting towards High-Performance Computing (HPC). Agent-based crowd simulation is one of the candidates that requires high-performance computing. This type of application is used to predict crowd movement in highly congested areas. One of the most crucial scenarios in which this application can be used is to mimic the movement of the multi-cultural crowd performing Hajj and Umrah in Masjid Al-Haram, Makkah. Adequate performance for an agent-based crowd system is a common problem in computer science. While the existing event planning software, specifically for Hajj and Umrah, are unable to provide the required performance. The main reason is the increasing amount of autonomous pilgrims every year. In this paper, we propose a high performance agent-based crowd simulation that represents pilgrim movement during these rituals. The performance is achieved by parallelizing an open source steering library called OpenSteer using CUDA over GPU. By using our technique, event organizers will be able to simulate large crowds and will also be able to predict whether the developed event plan is viable or not. We have also discussed the architecture and implementation of this parallel Hajj simulation.

Solving Hajj and Umrah Challenges Using Information and Communication Technology: A Survey

“…The intelligent agent is able to mimic natural crowd behavior. AbdurRahman and his colleagues also proposed an agent-based crowd simulation for Hajj [257]. His model utilizes parallel programming advancement using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to be able to simulate large crowds and check organization plans beforehand.Similarly, Abdul Majid et al proposed useing GPUs to simulate in a parallel fashion the navigational behaviors of agent-based crowd models during Hajj.…”

“…[296] Fog Computing [208], [293], [297] Game Theory [203] Global Positioning System (GPS) /Geographic Information System (GIS) [63]- [65], [71], [74], [75], [81], [85], [87], [88], [90], [91], [98], [101], [105], [115], [125], [143], [182], [189], [191], [196], [205], [239], [262], [273], [274], [282], [284], [292] Graphics Processing Units (GPU) [257], [258] Image Processing and Computer Vision [83], [84], [147], [226], [227], [242], [250], [252], [286] Internet of Things (IoT) [68], [69], [113], [195], [22...…”

Digital Revolution for Hajj Crowd Management: A Technology Survey

“…Rahman et al, [137] presented an agent-based crowd simulation using CUDA over a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) to correctly navigate an agent through the environment while avoiding obstacles. Due to the limited computational power of CPUs to display this increasing number of pilgrims, the execution time for a single simulation step increases, which in turns decreases the frames generated per second.…”

Improved OpenCL-Based Implementation of Social Field Pedestrian Model

“…Unfortunately, the research on GPU in the field of crowd simulation is far behind other disciplines. Before the authors, only a few scholars have been engaged in relevant research [19][20][21][22]. Furthermore, as far as the final results are concerned, their research findings are not exciting and suggest a space for further improvement.…”