An application of CoSMoS design methods to pedestrian simulation

Simulation, which creates abstractions of the system is an appropriate approach for study- ing complex systems that are inaccessible through direct observation and measurement. The problem with simulation of great numbers of interacting entities is that it is difficult to cre- ate a reliable and tractable abstraction of the real system. Indeed, simulating large numbers of entities requires great computing resources. A solution to avoid this problem is to use macroscopic models. However, this type of model may be unavailable or not reliable for the problem at hand and it doesn't allow the observation of individual behaviours. In this paper a multi-level simulation model is proposed to allowing the use of both microscopic and macroscopic techniques. This model is based upon Holonic Multi-Agent Systems which offer a promising approach for developing applications in complex domains characterised by a hierarchical structure. The proposed approach provides a generic scheduling model ...

International Journal of Simulation, 2007

The modelling of pedestrian behaviour in a real-world environment is a complex problem, mainly due to the unpredictable nature of human decision making. Agent-oriented simulation moves away from traditional all-knowing and "controlling" simulations and towards reality, where pedestrians exhibit different behaviours depending on their knowledge of the environment and other personal characteristics. We investigate the behaviours that pedestrians may exhibit, the different techniques used for pedestrian modelling, and the appropriateness of each technique for particular domains. The classification framework developed will play a role in the decision making process for planning and design of pedestrian areas. We then explore the agent-based approach in more detail, in particular the belief-desireintention (BDI) architecture, by presenting the development of a sample model using Prometheus, an agent-oriented design methodology, and JACK, an agent-oriented programming language. Although the BDI architecture is useful for high-level decision making, further work is required in representing and updating the environment.

… and Technology for …

2009

The advent of mobile agent technology has brought along a few difficulties in designing a stable, efficient and scalable system for a certain problem. Agent-based simulations prove to be powerful tools for economic analyses. In this paper we aim at describing a set of design patterns which were specifically built for agents and multi-agent systems. The details of each design pattern discussed are presented and the possible applications and known issues are noted. In order to aid the software designers, we provide some examples of the basic implementation of these patterns using the JADE multi-agent framework.

2021

Pedestrian simulation is often forgotten or implemented poorly in most high profile traffic simulators. This is the case of SUMO, where the pedestrian models are very simple and not based in real human behaviour, making it impossible to study pedestrian safety with it. With this in mind, the ability to externally control pedestrians in SUMO was explored. Using Unity3D to create an external three dimensional representation of a running SUMO simulation, we were able to create and control pedestrians through the TraCI API. This also opened the possibility to use virtual reality immersed subjects to participate in the simulation, opening the door to study real pedestrian behaviour to create more elaborate models. It also allowed us to completely offload the pedestrian simulation from SUMO to Unity3D, which was tested with the external implementation of the social forces model, without losing SUMO's interactions between pedestrians and motorized vehicles.

Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, 2009

In this paper, a new approach to autonomous agent navigation in real-time applications is presented. Effective driving simulators demand a realistic simulation of both the driven vehicle and the surrounding environment. For example, a variety of pedestrians and autonomous vehicles improve the realism of the simulation. Many studies of virtual environments for autonomous navigation are based on complex spatial subdivisions. Our approach takes advantage of the topological structure of cities, where pedestrians usually walk along straight pavements, to develop a new method for the simulation of autonomous pedestrians. The "smart obstacle" concept is introduced and a method for realistic corner turning is also explained. Our approach has been applied to simulate the motion of pedestrians on train station platforms, the results of which are presented and discussed.

2009

Pedestrian movement behavior can be analyzed in different ways. One of the most common approaches for this subject is the cellular automata. However, the pedestrian behavior is usually modeled by a reactive-response framework. Also, the pedestrians are treated as just numbers or elements in a grid. This paper proposes a basic framework for a multi-agent pedestrian movement model. Applying the same rules found in a cellular-automata-reactive model, this framework allows a new look for this kind of phenomenon, and it paves the ground for a more cognitive agent model and a physical environment with distinct features as well.

2008

Pedestrian simulations have recently focused on top-down implementations ignoring more computationally intensive agent based dynamics. This paper presents a framework for agent based modelling on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) which demonstrates large scale pedestrian simulation and rendering. GPU hardware offers significant performance for dynamic large crowd simulations, however the process of mapping computational tasks to the GPU is not trivial and expert knowledge is required. An agent based specification technique is therefore presented, which allows the underlying GPU data storage and agent communication to be hidden. The framework allows the use of static maps to set static environment obstacles and a zoning technique is described for route planning. Parallel population feedback routines are also used to implement Level of Detail (LOD) rendering which avoids any costly CPU data read-back. .

A large scale pedestrian simulation method, implemented with an agent based modelling paradigm, is presented within this paper. It allows rapid prototyping and real-time modifications, suitable for quick generation and testing of the viability of pedestrian movement in urban environments. The techniques described for pedestrian simulation make use of parallel processing through graphics card hardware allowing simulation scales to far exceed those of serial frameworks for agent based modelling. The simulation has been evaluated through benchmarking of the performances manipulating population size, navigation grid, and averaged simulation steps. The results demon- strate that this is a robust and scalable method for implementing pedestrian navigation behaviour. Furthermore an algorithm for generating smooth and realistic pedestrian navigation paths that works well in both small and large spaces is presented. An adaptive smoothing function has been utilised to optimise the path used by pedestrian agents to navigate around in a complex dynamic environment. Optimised and un-optimised vectors maps obtained by applying or not such function are compared, and the results show that the optimized path generates a more realistic flow.