Analyzing Emergency Evacuation Strategies for Mass Gatherings using Crowd Simulation And Analysis framework (original) (raw)

Analyzing Emergency Evacuation Strategies for Mass Gatherings using Crowd Simulation and Analysis framework: Hajj Scenario

Hajj is one of the largest mass gatherings where Muslims from all over the world gather in Makah each year for pilgrimage. A mass assembly of such scale bears a huge risk of disaster either natural or man-made. In the past few years, thousands of casualties have occurred while performing different Hajj rituals, especially during the Circumambulation of Kaba (Tawaf) due to stampede or chaos. During such calamitous situations, an appropriate evacuation strategy can help resolve the problem and mitigate further risk of causalities. It is however a daunting research problem to identify an optimal course of action based on several constraints. Modeling and analyzing such a problem of real-time and spatially explicit complexity requires a microscale crowd simulation and analysis framework. Which not only allows the modeler to express the spatial dimensions and features of the environment in real scale, but also provides modalities to capture complex crowd behaviors. In this paper, we propose an Agent-based Crowd Simulation & Analysis framework that incorporates the use of Anylogic Pedestrian library and integrates/interoperate Anylogic Simulation environment with the external modules for optimization and analysis. Hence provides a runtime environment for analyzing complex situations, e.g., emergency evacuation strategies. The key features of the proposed framework include: (i) Ability to model large crowd in a spatially explicit environment at real-scale; (ii) Simulation of complex crowd behavior such as emergency evacuation; (iii) Interoperability of optimization and analysis modules with simulation runtime for evaluating evacuation strategies. We present a case study of Hajj scenario as a proof of concept and a test bed for identifying and evaluating optimal strategies for crowd evacuation CCS Concepts • Computing methodologies ➝ Modeling and simulation ➝Simulation types and techniques ➝ Agent / discrete models. • Computing methodologies ➝ Modeling and simulation ➝ Simulation support systems ➝ Simulation tools. • Computing methodologies ➝ Machine learning ➝ Machine learning approaches ➝ Bio-inspired approaches ➝ Genetic algorithms. • Computing methodologies ➝ Modeling and simulation ➝ Model development and analysis ➝ Modeling methodologies.

A Multi-Agent Architecture for Evacuating Pilgrims in Panic and Emergency Situations : The Hajj Scenario

2018

This paper proposes and presents the details of an agent-based architecture that has the capacity to model, simulate the movement of, and guide crowds with panic behavior in highly-dense areas in the events of manmade and natural threats. The most populated human gathering in the world, the Muslim pilgrimage event (also known as Hajj) which attracts more than two million people in six days is chosen to guide the identification of the requirements and main concepts of the agent simulation. The inferred requirements are used to guide the selection of an appropriate simulation tool following an extensive survey of potential simulation tools. The architecture uses software agents to represent groups of people along with their real time characteristics such as density, movements and panic levels, collected from various data sources. Support vector machine is combined with the fuzzy logic theory to predict pilgrims' behaviors and movements in case of panic situations. Initial simulati...

Crowd Simulation Modeling Applied to Emergency and Evacuation Simulations using Multi-Agent Systems

2013

In recent years crowd modeling has become increasingly important both in the computer games industry and in emergency simulation. This paper discusses some aspects of what has been accomplished in this field, from social sciences to the computer implementation of modeling and simulation. Problem overview is described including some of the most common techniques used. Multi-Agent Systems is stated as the preferred approach for emergency evacuation simulations. A framework is proposed based on the work of Fangqin and Aizhu with extensions to include some BDI aspects. Future work includes expansion of the model's features and implementation of a prototype for validation of the propose methodology.

Simulation and Modelling the Human Crowd Evacuation

IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering

The operational research (OR) become one of emerging areas and significance and its relevance to be used in the simulation and modelling. To simulating and modelling the crowd evacuation, the most important elements to have in a realistic model is the appropriate simulation technique. To simulate the evacuee's movement in crowd is still in research and challenge because of the emergence and become a complex task and dangerous for the real and actual case. The computational simulation technique is required in order to model the crowd evacuation as one part of OR and become a solution to represent the fire crowd evacuation in the closed space e.g. Building relates to human movement and its states. The theories and concept of computational method allows for creating, analysing and experimentation. The techniques; Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), Social Force Model (SFM) and the hybrid SFM/ABS has been proposed for this research work. SFM is the well-known and popular technique for crowd evacuation while ABS is best-known, intelligent and appropriate to imitate the human movement. This paper provides a review of this research work from an OR perspective and the outcomes of a review of the computational simulation techniques literature are presented, using a proposed conceptual model will be valuable for future researchers, and modellers alike.

Individual-oriented Model Crowd Evacuations Distributed Simulation

Procedia Computer Science, 2014

Emergency plan preparation is an important problem in building design to evacuate people as fast as possible. Simulation exercises as fire drills are not a realistic situation to understand people behaviour. In the case of crowd evacuations the complexity and uncertainty of the systems increases. Computer simulation allows us to run crowd dynamics models and extract information from emergency situations. Several models solve the emergency evacuation problem. Individual oriented modelling allows to give behaviour rules to the individual and simulate interactions between them. Due to variation on the emergency situations results have to be statistically reliable. This reliability increases the computing demand. Distributed and parallel paradigms solve the performance problem. In the present work we present a crowd evacuations distributed simulator. We implemented two versions of the model. One using Netlogo and another using C with MPI. We chose a real environment to test the simulator: pavilion 2 of Fira de Barcelona building, able to hold thousands of persons. The distributed simulator was tested with 62,820 runs in a distributed environment with 15,000 individuals. In this work we show how the distributed simulator has a linear speedup and scales efficiently.

Crowd Simulation Applied to Emergency and Evacuation Scenarios

Advances in Artificial Transportation Systems and Simulation, 2015

In recent years crowd modeling has become increasingly important both in the computer games industry and in emergency simulation. This paper discusses some aspects of what has been accomplished in this field, from social sciences to the computer implementation of modeling and simulation. Problem overview is described including some of the most common techniques used. Multi-Agent Systems is stated as the preferred approach for emergency evacuation simulations. A framework is proposed based on the work of Fangqin and Aizhu with extensions to include some BDI aspects. Future work includes expansion of the model's features and implementation of a prototype for validation of the propose methodology.

Agent-Based Simulation of Crowd Evacuation Behavior

2009

In this paper an approach using agents for handling the emergency route simulation is presented. It takes into account the problem of uncharacteristic actions of an unsettled group of people in case of heavy stress given by a local disaster. The algorithm is an extension of the Boids simulation method with additional rules to better accommodate the human crowd evacuation behavior.

Crowd Evacuation Modeling and Simulation Using Care HPS

Procedia Computer Science, 2017

The problem of evacuating crowded closed spaces, such as discotheques, public exhibition pavilions or concert houses, has become increasingly important and gained attention both from practitioners and from public authorities. This kind of problem can be modeled using Agent-Based Model techniques and consequently simulated in order to study evacuation strategies. In this paper, we show the Fira of Barcelona evacuation model implemented with Care HPS. As a main contribution: i) we extend and added new partitioning approaches and other features in Care HPS to carry on this model; and ii) we figured out that crowd evacuation problem has bottlenecks in reality, such as exits, that required more deep optimization in code in order to decrease the total execution time. Finally, we draw some conclusions and point out ways in which this work can be further extended.

A Framework to Simulate the Evacuation of a Crowd in Emergency Situations

Georgian Electronic Scientific Journal: …, 2006

Abstract: This paper describes a model for simulating crowds in real time. We deal with the hierarchy of the crowd, groups and individuals. The groups are the most complex structure that can be controlled in different degrees of autonomy. The autonomy means that the virtual agents ...