Pedestrian Simulation

We study the Cauchy problem both for a non-linear diffusion-convection equation and for a first order hyperbolic conservation law. The latter can be regarded as the zero diffusion limit of the former, which is of degenerate parabolic type. Concerning support properties, the behaviour of solutions of both problems exhibits striking analogies when the effect of convection is stronger than diffusion. Hence previously reported phenomena concerning the parabolic problem can be interpreted as being of hyperbolic type.

This thesis proposes the use of Serious Games as a behaviour elicitation tool in addition to the traditional methods such as direct observations or statedpreference questionnaires. The resulting knowledge is needed to improve behavioural models of intelligent agents mimicking pedestrians. From the literature review and subsequent gap analysis, a methodological approach was envisaged leading to the Conceptualisation of a novel methodology for human behaviour elicitation coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrians and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics) aimed at revealing human behaviour and capturing the complex activities of pedestrians in the real world. As a case study, the behaviour of pedestrians when searching the best path to exit from a building was chosen. Building egress, or evacuation, has gained increasing interest by the research community, with important implications to architecture and building management, related to safety. Stakeholders, including architects and fire engineers, need simulation tools to validate building safety, namely evacuation simulators. The agent-based evacuation simulators, although attempting to implement some sort of intelligence into the agents mimicking humans, lack realism and knowledge on behavioural aspects related to humans. SPEED proposes to address this problem, using Serious Games. A set of experiments conceived with the help of an international expert panel, based on the Delphi method, were put up to test the methodology. After a pilot test, three experiments were made using Serious Games and questionnaires. The results were statistically analysed evidencing the subjects preferences and applied into an agent-based simulator developed using NetLogo. These agents were modelled by using the peer-designed agents (PDA) concept that emerged recently within the artificial intelligence community. The SPEED approach can be used for knowledge elicitation of pedestrian behaviours in other contexts, besides egress, within social simulation, based on the PDA concept.

62 -n. 3/4 marzo-aprile 2009 49 Dall'Università human articulations by making synergistically use of the available constraints in Visual Na-stran. The skeletal complex and the muscles in their principal functions are substituted by constraints supporting the movement or limit-ing it in opportune way. The problem of the articular friction is very efficaciously outdone; it is a notoriously com-plex problem in the case of Dummy models, really produced to crash test. In the practice the reproduction of the same friction condi-tions of the human articulations trough the thin synovial liquid is very complex in general, while it is very simple and immediate trough the multi body simulation, inserting con-straints with the correct setting. A measure of the injury entity is the value of HIC (Head Injury Criterion) correlating the acceleration level measured on the head gra-vity centre, with the duration time. Some free fall simulations are executed to test the Dum-my, differing for the i...

We consider wave-front tracking approximate solutions to a two-phase transition model for vehicular traffic. We construct an explicit example showing that the total variation in space of the solution blows up in finite time even for an initial datum with bounded total variation.

This paper deals with the problem of simulating crowd evacuations in multicore architectures. Manage evacuations is an important issue that involves lives, and in the case of crowds, thousands of lives. We present our model, able to hold thousands of agents walking through the scenario avoiding dynamic and static obstacles. We test how the model behaves with agents falling down, becoming an obstacle. Simulators are widely used in the area of crowd evacuations. In the present work we introduce a crowd model and a HPC simulation tool. We used OpenMP to program a multicore architecture.

We consider a piecewise smooth solution to a scalar conservation law, with possibly interacting shocks. We show that, after the interactions have taken place, vanishing viscosity approximations can still be represented by a regular expansion on smooth regions and by a singular perturbation expansion near the shocks, in terms of powers of the viscosity coefficient.

We consider wave-front tracking approximate solutions to a two-phase transition model for vehicular traffic. We construct an explicit example showing that the total variation in space of the solution blows up in finite time even for an initial datum with bounded total variation.

We provide an overview of the results on Hughes' model for pedestrian movements available in the literature. The model consists of a nonlinear conservation law coupled with an eikonal equation. The main difficulty in developing a proper mathematical theory lies in the lack of regularity of the flux in the conservation law, which yields the possibility of non-classical shocks that are generated non-locally by the whole distribution of pedestrians. This is a possible reason behind the availability of existence results only on one-dimensional spatial domains, despite the model having a more natural setting in two spatial dimensions. After the first successful approaches to solving a regularised version of the model, researchers focused on the structure of the Riemann problem, which led to local-in-time existence results for Riemann-type data and paved the way for a WFT (Wave-Front Tracking) approach to the solution semigroup. In parallel, a DPA (Deterministic Particles Approximation) approach was developed in the spirit of follow-the-leader approximation results for scalar conservation laws. Beyond having proved to be powerful analytical tools, the WFT and the DPA approaches also led to interesting numerical results. However, only existence theorems on very specific classes of initial data (essentially ruling out non-classical shocks) have been available until very recently. A proper existence result using a DPA approach was proven not long ago in the case of a linear coupling with the density in the eikonal equation. Shortly after, a similar result was proven via a fixed point approach. We provide a detailed statement of the aforementioned results and sketch the main proofs. We also provide a brief overview of results that are related to Hughes' model, such as the derivation of a dynamic version of the model via a mean-field game strategy, an alternative optimal control approach, and a localized version of the model. We also present the main numerical results within the WFT and DPA frameworks. • a continuum description at the level of the interaction of sub-populations of the system, known as the macroscopic level. Each level has an associated class of mathematical equations which provide an appropriate model. Usually their structures at various levels are completely different, see e.g. [9]. We defer the reader to [32-34] for an overview of the various research directions in the field of crowd dynamics. One of the most original and mathematically challenging models is the one proposed by Roger L. Hughes [41], which is part of the third approach above. Hughes' model describes evacuation scenarios, in which a crowd wants to exit a given domain D ⊂ R 2 , with one or several exits, as fast as possible. The crowd population is described through a density. The driving force towards the exits is the gradient of a potential , which satisfies an eikonal equation coupled with the density. The potential represents the expected travel time towards an exit and accounts for the best strategy to minimise the exit time. The resulting model is a nonlinear conservation law for coupled with the gradient of the potential ; the latter depends on non-locally in space. Even in the simplest case of space dimension one, no more than Lipschitz continuity can be expected for. Moreover, can change its sign just once from positive to negative. In this case, a turning curve = () may be defined in the one-dimensional domain, at which reaches its maximum. As a result, the flux of the conservation law for is possibly discontinuous along = () and, on the other hand, depends non-locally on. Furthermore, is not expected to satisfy in general the Lax entropy inequalities (see [43]). Therefore, the possible appearance of non-classical shocks along the turning curve has to be taken into account. Non-classical shocks correspond to pedestrians changing direction during the evacuation. Because of these various difficulties, the existence and uniqueness analysis for the Hughes' model appears to be challenging. This motivates the first approach to the problem developed in [27], in which a smoothened version of the eikonal equation is considered, with an extra Laplacian term. Despite it covers only the one-dimensional case and despite it deals only with an approximated version of the model rather than the actual model, the result in [27] remains until now the only result in a large data setting which holds for a fairly general class of density-potential coupling. As we will detail later on, the first existence results for the actual Hughes model appeared only very recently, and only for specific couplings. Let us also mention the existence and uniqueness result proved in [19, Theorem 2.6] for a two dimensional regularized version of the Hughes model, which holds for large data but with a potential depending only on the given domain D, see also [36]. Parallel to [27] or shortly after it, some researchers started to study the Riemann problem for the model in the spirit of scalar conservation laws and to develop proper numerical schemes, see [2, 3, 7, 30] for the Riemann data part and [11, 12, 16, 17, 35, 40, 51] for the numerics. Both in [2] and [30], the authors study the Riemann problems for the Hughes' model in detail. This study is strictly related to the effectiveness of the Wave-Front Tracking (WFT) strategy [21] for the Hughes' model. The WFT algorithm was then first exploited in [35], but only for numerical purposes, and then in [3] to prove the first existence result for the Hughes' model, but under very restrictive assumptions that rule out non-classical shocks. A simpler proof of an analogous existence result was then obtained in [25] by means of a Deterministic Particle Approximation (DPA) and the results proved in [28], see also [23, 24, 26, 29]. The first existence result accounting for the possible presence of non-classical shocks was recently obtained in [7]. The authors obtain this result by exploiting the properties of the linear cost introduced in [30] (the key fact here is that linear costs yield a uniform Lipschitz bound on), combined with the DPA adapted to the Hughes' model in [25]. Despite being only valid for linear costs and in one space dimension, this result has the merit of being the first existence result on the Hughes model for large data and in presence of non-classical shocks. This result is reproved in [6] via a non-constructive Schauder fixed-point approach allowing for a wide variety of generalizations of the one-dimensional Hughes' model (different ways to compute the turning curve from the density , different exit conditions). Concerning uniqueness, only very partial results are available for the one-dimensional Hughes' model; they require BV regularity of the density and the highly restrictive assumption of zero density traces (, () ±) at the turning curve (see [7, Theorem 4], see also [3, 25] for particular cases). Apart from the regularised version proposed in [27], other variants of the Hughes model have been proposed: a first one in [14, 37] obtained a similar model with a time derivative in the eikonal equation, justified through an optimal control problem, and a second one in [18] trying to remove the global awareness of the pedestrians in the model, which seems unrealistic in some situations. Further variants with more flexible boundary conditions for the density, with memory or relaxation effects in the dynamics of , are proposed and studied in [6]. The chapter is structured as follows. In Section 2 we derive Hughes' model in the way it was done in the original paper [41] by Roger L. Hughes, plus some additional considerations by the authors of this survey. We also provide a rephrasement of the model in the special case of one space dimension. In Section 3 we detail the local-in-time solution of the Riemann problem. In Section 4 we collect the existence result provided for the model, from the ones holding only for small data or symmetric data provided in [3, 26], to the main one provided in [7] for the case of linear cost. In Section 5 we describe the construction of the Wave-Front Tracking (WFT) algorithm used to prove the existence results in [3]. In Section 6 we introduce the Deterministic Particle Approximation (DPA) of the model leading to the results in [26] and [7]. In Section 7 we describe in detail the main existence result of [7]. In Section 8 we briefly describe the fixed-point approach of [6], with a second proof of this main existence result and several extensions. Section 9 is devoted to numerical simulations, both using the WFT algorithm and the DPA scheme. Finally, in Section 10 we summarise the

We consider a macroscopic two-phase transition model for vehicular traffic flow subject to a point constraint on the density flux. The two phases correspond to light and heavy traffic and their dynamics are described respectively by the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards model and the Aw-Rascle-Zhang model. Their intersection, the so-called metastable phase, is assumed to be non empty. The discrete in time point constraint mechanism, inducing flux limitation at bottlenecks, is explored within this two-phase model. We introduce a new definition of admissible solutions for the Cauchy problem, for which we prove existence and we provide a characterization. In particular, these admissible solutions attain the maximal flux allowed by the constraint whenever it is enforced, which guarantees compatibility of the constructed solutions with the modeling assumption imposed at the level of the Riemann solver. These results rely on the wave-front tracking method and on adaptation of the specific entropies and renormalization properties introduced in Andreainov, Donadello, Rosini, M3AS (2016) while dealing with the Aw-Rascle-Zhang model with point constraint.

In the context of road traffic modeling we consider a scalar hyperbolic conservation law with the flux (fundamental diagram) which is discontinuous at x = 0, featuring variable velocity limitation. The flow maximization criterion for selection of a unique admissible weak solution is generally admitted in the literature, however justification for its use can be traced back to the irrelevant vanishing viscosity approximation. We seek to assess the use of this criterion on the basis of modeling proper to the traffic context. We start from a first order microscopic follow-the-leader (FTL) model deduced from basic interaction rules between cars. We run numerical simulations of FTL model with large number of agents on truncated Riemann data, and observe convergence to the flow-maximizing Riemann solver. As an obstacle towards rigorous convergence analysis, we point out the lack of order-preservation of the FTL semigroup. Keywords Conservation laws • Traffic flow • Discontinuous flux • Riemann solvers • First order follow-the-leader model • Order-preservation • Point constraint on the flux • Follow-the-leader semigroup MDR is member of GNAMPA. MDR acknowledges the support of the National Science Centre, Poland, Project "Mathematics of multi-scale approaches in life and social sciences" No. 2017/25/B/ST1/00051, by the INdAM-GNAMPA Project 2019 "Equazioni alle derivate parziali di tipo iperbolico o non locale ed applicazioni" and by University of Ferrara, FIR Project 2019 "Leggi di conservazione di tipo iperbolico: teoria ed applicazioni".

Urban planners and architects have used different design criteria by following project processes different from each other through the ages. The common point of all these projects has been functionality which is one of the most important criteria for human based design. Aesthetics, beauty and similar terms may be arguable but a non-functional spatial design must not be accepted. All spaces, cities, squares, parks, roads and buildings are designed for people. If these urban structures are not suitable for them, people will have serious problems in terms of general circulation. Therefore, ergonomics and functionality terms must be the basic design criteria of all human based urban planning and architectural design processes. How may it be possible to understand an urban design project or a building is functional before constructing it? The aim of this article is to explain the benefits of pedestrian simulation technologies through the design processes in both theoretical and practical frameworks on a case study area which is an underground metro station. A capacity analysis and circulation assessment has been carried out on the metro station by using Massmotion pedestrian simulation software.

Urban planners and architects have used different design criteria by following project processes different from each other through the ages. The common point of all these projects has been functionality which is one of the most important criteria for human based design. Aesthetics, beauty and similar terms may be arguable but a non-functional spatial design must not be accepted. All spaces, cities, squares, parks, roads and buildings are designed for people. If these urban structures are not suitable for them, people will have serious problems in terms of general circulation. Therefore, ergonomics and functionality terms must be the basic design criteria of all human based urban planning and architectural design processes. How may it be possible to understand an urban design project or a building is functional before constructing it? The aim of this article is to explain the benefits of pedestrian simulation technologies through the design processes in both theoretical and practical...

The problem of leaving a building while facing some emergency has gained much attention from the scientific community. Evacuation simulators can help emergency planners to assess the safety of buildings. However, such simulators still lack behavioural knowledge to increase their accuracy. The elderly have specific behaviour idiosyncrasies. This paper presents a set of experiments designed to elicit human behaviour in evacuation scenarios using serious games, applied to a population sample of 20 adults aged over 65 years. They were presented three experiments (alarm id, exit-choice in five different situations and auditorium with four situations) and their reactions were collected. Results were analysed and compared with previous similar experiments. Future directions in this research include: to expand and to refine data collection to other scenarios and perform massive data collection using the internet; and to use this data to feed and enhance existing crowd simulators particularly for evacuation purposes.

Serious Games are increasingly used as a tool for various applications contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. Many game engines are available, and Unity3D is another example that presents some features such as rapid prototyping and an easy learning curve. The 3D space where action takes place is sometimes hard to map into a logical memory structure providing flexible access to that information. The problem of tracking players' path as well as their decisions in 3D environments arises when there is no previous knowledge of the scenario representation and the creation of a memory data structure poses an extra effort for the modeller. The proposed solution in this paper, albeit simple, is a straightforward way to track the location of the video game character and map it when he/she passes certain limits. This mechanism proved to represent a key step forward, addressing the important issue of tracking the decision-making process of players for future analysis and behaviour elicitation.

The dynamics of pedestrians have received less attention in transportation systems when compared to cars and other transportation means. However, its importance is inarguable and, recently, a lot of effort on research was put into this field. The use of Agent-Based Models (ABM) and known techniques such as the Social Forces Model (SFM) has fostered this most recent application field. Several models are already available for crowd simulation, but the validation of such models is a critical issue. Methodologies for behaviour elicitation and validation in social simulation models are needed. In this paper, a new framework to tackle these problems is proposed. Based on research made for more specific applications, concerned with buildings' evacuation, a methodological approach to develop a simulator for pedestrian's dynamics consisting of five main tasks is proposed hereafter. The tasks are: 1) "Reference Models and Benchmarks"; 2) "Pedestrian Sensor Fusion"; 3) "Serious Games for Pedestrian Behaviour Elicitation;" 4) "Behaviour Mining," and 5) "Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation of Pedestrian Elicitation of Emergent Dynamics," a Decision Support Tool aimed at the study and analysis at pedestrian dynamics in the urban context, specifically for helping planners to develop the new generation of buildings and cities.

Serious Games are increasingly used as a training and educational tool. Fire keeps claiming a high number of victims. Some authors allege failures during the evacuation process as the main cause that contributes for that number. Fire drills are used to train buildings' occupants for emergency situations. However, fire drills' participants often have prior knowledge of their schedule and as result they are not as focused as they should. Moreover, fire drills require the mobilization of some resources, leading to financial costs. Performing a fire drill will always affect the normal functioning of the place where they take place; for this reason, sometimes they are not performed at all. In some special locations, like hospitals, fire drills are unsuitable. Emergency planning is crucial to prevent and minimize damage and victims. Albeit the improvement on safety measures, many occupants and employers in this type of buildings still lack adequate knowledge and training on how to behave in such hazardous situations. EVA is presented as a possible solution, which is based on the concept of Serious Game that can be used as a training tool for healthcare professionals. A preliminary prototype was developed. A sample of 20 subjects was selected to test it giving promising results. Results also showed that users who had training in fire prevention appear to perform better in the course. Moreover, participants who regularly play computer games overcame easily the game challenges. Further research and development are still to be explored, which are discussed in the concluding part of this paper.

The problem of leaving a building while facing some emergency has gained much attention from the scientific community. Evacuation simulators can help emergency planners to assess the safety of buildings. However, such simulators still lack behavioural knowledge to increase their accuracy. The elderly have specific behaviour idiosyncrasies. This paper presents a set of experiments designed to elicit human behaviour in evacuation scenarios using serious games, applied to a population sample of 20 adults aged over 65 years. They were presented three experiments (alarm id, exit-choice in five different situations and auditorium with four situations) and their reactions were collected. Results were analysed and compared with previous similar experiments. Future directions in this research include: to expand and to refine data collection to other scenarios and perform massive data collection using the internet; and to use this data to feed and enhance existing crowd simulators particularly for evacuation purposes.

Urban planners and architects have used different design criteria by following project processes different from each other through the ages. The common point of all these projects has been functionality which is one of the most important criteria for human based design. Aesthetics, beauty and similar terms may be arguable but a non-functional spatial design must not be accepted. All spaces, cities, squares, parks, roads and buildings are designed for people. If these urban structures are not suitable for them, people will have serious problems in terms of general circulation. Therefore, ergonomics and functionality terms must be the basic design criteria of all human based urban planning and architectural design processes. How may it be possible to understand an urban design project or a building is functional before constructing it? The aim of this article is to explain the benefits of pedestrian simulation technologies through the design processes in both theoretical and practical frameworks on a case study area which is an underground metro station. A capacity analysis and circulation assessment has been carried out on the metro station by using Massmotion pedestrian simulation software.

Owing to the complexity of behavioral dynamics and mechanisms associated with turning maneuvers, capturing pedestrian movements around corners in a mathematical model is a challenging task. In this study, minimum jerk and one-thirds power law concepts, which have been initially applied in neurosciences and brain research domains, were utilized in combination to model pedestrian movement planning around bends. Simulation outputs explained that the proposed model could realistically represent the behavioral characteristics of pedestrians walking through bends. Comparison of modeled trajectories with empirical data demonstrated that the accuracy of the model could further be improved by using appropriate parameters in the one-thirds power law equation. Sensitivity analysis explained that, although the paths were not sensitive to the boundary conditions, speed and acceleration profiles could be remarkably varied depending on boundary conditions. Further, the applicability of the proposed model to estimate trajectories of pedestrians negotiating bends under different entry, intermediate, and exit conditions was also identified. The proposed model can be applied in microscopic simulation platforms, virtual reality, and driving simulator applications to provide realistic and accurate maneuvers around corners.

The paper describes a study to characterise vertical dynamic loads and induced effects on a footbridge. The study comprehends the development of a numerical model to characterise the dynamic behaviour of the footbridge, which is experimentally validated and used to numerically simulate the response induced by groups of pedestrians synchronised at critical bridge frequencies. The vandal load associated with a single pedestrian is characterised and the response is calculated considering the measured load, and compared with the measured response to the excitation induced by a single pedestrian or a group with varying dimension. The definition of a general load model for vandal excitation is discussed.

We investigated the movement behavior of participants walking within a virtual crowd in an immersive virtual environment. We investigated three different parameters that characterize a moving virtual crowd: density, speed, and direction. An immersive road‐crossing scenario that took place in a virtual metropolitan city was created. In this scenario, the participants were instructed to walk toward the opposite sidewalk. Three measurements (speed, deviation, and trajectory length) were used to evaluate the impact of the parameters assigned to the virtual crowd on the movement behavior of the participants. Significant results were found for both the main and interaction effects. The results suggested that the high density, low speed, and diagonal direction situations associated with the virtual crowd had the greatest impacts on the speed, deviation, and trajectory lengths of participants when they walked in a virtual environment and were surrounded by a moving virtual population.

This paper describes our investigation on how participants coordinate movement behavior in relation to a virtual crowd that surrounds them while immersed in a virtual environment. The participants were immersed in a virtual metropolitan city and were instructed to cross the road and reach the opposite sidewalk. The participants performed the task ten times. The virtual crowd that surrounded them was scripted to move in the same direction. During the experiment, several measurements were obtained to evaluate human movement coordination. Moreover, the time and direction in which the participants started moving toward the opposite sidewalk were also captured. These data were later used to initialize the parameters of simulated characters that were scripted to become part of the virtual crowd. Measurements were extracted from the simulated characters and used as a baseline to evaluate the movement coordination of the participants. By analyzing the data, significant differences between t...

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.

MouseHaus Table is a computationally enhanced physical environment that supports collaborative urban design discussion. The system consists of a custom-made table with a rear projection screen, a video camera, projector and a simple pedestrian simulation program. MouseHaus Table provides a physical interface that enables participants who have no previous computer experience to interact with a pedestrian simulation program.

The abundance and importance of complex 3-D data bases in major industry segments, the affordability of interactive 3-D rendering for office and consumer use, and the exploitation of the Internet to distribute and share 3-D data have intensified the need for an effective 3-D geometric compression technique that would significantly reduce the time required to transmit 3-D models over digital communication channels, and the amount of memory or disk space required to store the models. Because the prevalent representation of 3-D models for graphics purposes is polyhedral and because polyhedral models are in general triangulated for rendering, this article introduces a new compressed representation for complex triangulated models and simple, yet efficient, compression and decompression algorithms. In this scheme, vertex positions are quantized within the desired accuracy, a vertex spanning tree is used to predict the position of each vertex from 2,3, or 4 of its ancestors in the tree, an...

Serious Games are increasingly used as a tool for various applications contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. Many game engines are available, and Unity3D is another example that presents some features such as rapid prototyping and an easy learning curve. The 3D space where action takes place is sometimes hard to map into a logical memory structure providing flexible access to that information. The problem of tracking players' path as well as their decisions in 3D environments arises when there is no previous knowledge of the scenario representation and the creation of a memory data structure poses an extra effort for the modeller. The proposed solution in this paper, albeit simple, is a straightforward way to track the location of the video game character and map it when he/she passes certain limits. This mechanism proved to represent a key step forward, addressing the important issue of tracking the decision-making process of players for future analysis and behaviour elicitation.

Stress ribbon bridges have many advantages and became recently more popular mostly because of their versatile form, slender decks giving a light aesthetic impression and durability assured by post tensioned concrete. The paper presents the first in Poland stress Ribbon Bridge constructed last year. A static and dynamic analyse of the model is presented as well as construction solutions which were used to achieve the highest durability. The bridge was checked during static and dynamic load test. The results of this prove test were compared with results obtained from examination and study of other different bridge structures. It confirmed that the bridge has good dynamic resistance and greater stiffness than assumed in the design.

This assessment grid is dedicated to evaluating pedestrian models in the context of railway stations, including massive passenger flows and train arrivals and departures’ influence on the pedestrian demand. The evaluation is done for both scientific and industrial goals, and thus includes criteria about the possible use of such models in operations. For example, is the model capable of running simulations fast enough to help a global station management system take decisions in real time. Global methodology is explained in the main article, “On pedestrian traffic management in railway stations: simulation needs and model assessment”, submitted for review for 21st EURO Working Group on Transportation Meeting (EWGT 2018) on April 20th, 2018. The evaluation addresses four aspects of pedestrian models: (1) access conditions (2) application conditions (3) crowd dynamics issues and (4) modeling and simulation. These questions are derived from a literature review (Duives, Daamen, &Hoogendoo...

Mass transit rail stations make up complex systems in which passenger flows have significant influence on operations and traffic conditions. Are there pedestrian simulators that can effectively contribute to the management of crowd flows? To answer this question, an assessment grid is built to address scientific principles as well as operational and organizational needs. The scientific principles encompass real-world features to be described, especially causalities to reproduce. The grid is applied to several commercially-available software (including PTVVisWalk, Legion, Anylogic, MassMotion and SimWalk) as well as to researchsourced pedestrian simulators.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) allow new ways of regulating the traffic flow on road networks. Most of available results in this direction are based on microscopic approaches, where ODEs describe the evolution of regular cars and AVs. In this paper, we propose a multiscale approach, based on recently developed models for moving bottlenecks. Our main result is the proof of existence of solutions for time-varying bottleneck speed, which corresponds to open-loop controls with bounded variation.

We consider a strongly coupled ODE-PDE system representing moving bottlenecks immersed in vehicular traffic. The PDE consists of a scalar conservation law modeling the traffic flow evolution and the ODE models the trajectory of a slow moving vehicle. The moving bottleneck influences the bulk traffic flow via a point flux constraint, which is given by an inequality on the flux at the slow vehicle position. We prove uniqueness and continuous dependence of solutions with respect to initial data of bounded variation. The proof is based on a new backward in time method established to capture the values of the norm of generalized tangent vectors at every time.

Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. One of their application domains is fire safety. Possible injuries from fires are a dangerous safety concern for children, for instance. Another important issue is the elicitation of behavioural knowledge to design and feed simulation models. The lack of human behaviour data is often referred to as a drawback to evacuation simulation designers. This paper addresses the aforementioned matters in respect to: i) acquiring valuable knowledge on children behaviour when facing the urgent need for evacuation; and ii) devising an educational tool. A group of 19 children from an elementary school played two different role plays using a Serious Game and the data of their behaviours was collected. Results were analysed and are here presented. Future work is twofold: to expand and to refine data collection to other groups such as elderly; to use this data for crowd synthesis particularly for evacuation simulators.

The evacuation of complex buildings is a challenge under any circumstances. Fire drills are a way of training and validating evacuation plans. However, sometimes these plans are not taken seriously by their participants. It is also difficult to have the financial and time resources required. In this scenario, serious games can be used as a tool for training, planning and evaluating emergency plans. In this paper a prototype of a serious games evacuation simulator is presented. To make the environment as realistic as possible, 3D models were made using Blender and loaded onto Unity3D, a popular game engine. This framework provided us with the appropriate simulation environment. Some experiences were made and results show that this tool has potential for practitioners and planners to use it for training building occupants.

Emergency evacuation plans and evacuation drills are mandatory in public buildings in many countries. Their importance is considerable when it comes to guarantee safety and protection during a crisis. However, sometimes discrepancies arise between the goals of the plan and its outcomes, because people find it hard to take them very seriously, or due to the financial and time resources required. Serious games are a possible solution to tackle this problem. They have been successfully applied in different areas such as health care and education, since they can simulate an environment/task quite accurately, making them a practical alternative to real-life simulations. This paper presents a serious game developed using Unity3D to recreate a virtual fire evacuation training tool. The prototype application was deployed which allowed the validation by user testing. A sample of 30 individuals tested the evacuating scenario, having to leave the building during a fire in the shortest time possible. Results have shown that users effectively end up learning some evacuation procedures from the activity, even if only to look for emergency signs indicating the best evacuation paths. It was also evidenced that users with higher video game experience had a significantly better performance.

The evacuation of complex buildings is a challenge under any circumstances. Fire drills are a way of training and validating evacuation plans. However, sometimes these plans are not taken seriously by their participants. It is also difficult to have the financial and time resources required. In this scenario, serious games can be used as a tool for training, planning and evaluating emergency plans. In this paper a prototype of a serious games evacuation simulator is presented. To make the environment as realistic as possible, 3D models were made using Blender and loaded onto Unity3D, a popular game engine. This framework provided us with the appropriate simulation environment. Some experiences were made and results show that this tool has potential for practitioners and planners to use it for training building occupants.

The evacuation of complex buildings is a challenge under any circumstances. Fire drills are a way of training and validating evacuation plans. However, sometimes these plans are not taken seriously by their participants. It is also difficult to have the financial and time resources required. In this scenario, serious games can be used as a tool for training, planning and evaluating emergency plans. In this paper a prototype of a serious games evacuation simulator is presented. To make the environment as realistic as possible, 3D models were made using Blender and loaded onto Unity3D, a popular game engine. This framework provided us with the appropriate simulation environment. Some experiences were made and results show that this tool has potential for practitioners and planners to use it for training building occupants.

The quantification of pedestrian safety is an important research topic. If reliable quantification is possible, it can be used to predict and prevent dangerous situations, such as the crowd crush at the 2010 Love Parade. To quantify safety, we can use several metrics like density, velocity, flow and pressure. Unfortunately, there are several methods to evaluate these metrics, which may give different results. This can lead to different interpretations of similar situations. Researchers compare these metrics visually or search for trends in fundamental diagrams. This is inherently subjective. We propose an objective methodology to compare these methods, where we emphasize the different quantifications of peak "dangerousness". Furthermore, we refine existing methods to include the obstacles in environments by replacing the Euclidean distance with the geodesic distance. In our experimental analysis, we observe large differences between different methods for the same scenarios. We conclude that switching to a different method of analysing crowd safety can lead to different conclusions, which asks for standardisation in this research field. Since we are concerned with human safety, we prefer to err on the side of caution. Therefore, we advocate the use of our refined Gaussian-based method, which consistently reports higher levels of danger.

Human behaviour knowledge is an important requirement for implementing realistic evacuation models. Although much work has been done in this field of research there are no universally accepted quantitative methods. In this paper we present a novel methodology for human behaviour elicitation that was coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrian and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics). An experimental setup to test the concept was envisaged and validated by a group of experts using the Delphi method. A test bed was designed using the Serious Games concept and 22 subjects were selected for a pilot test. Preliminary results are promising, showing that this methodology might be used for the elicitation of human behaviour of subjects when facing an emergency. Moreover, the data acquired is of great importance for the fire safety experts designing new buildings or planning strategies to improve emergency paths. Another possible outcome is to create an artificial population based on human beh...

Human behaviour knowledge is an important requirement for implementing realistic evacuation models. Although much work has been done in this field of research there are no universally accepted quantitative methods. In this paper we present a novel methodology for human behaviour elicitation that was coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrian and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics). An experimental setup to test the concept was envisaged and validated by a group of experts using the Delphi method. A test bed was designed using the Serious Games concept and 22 subjects were selected for a pilot test. Preliminary results are promising, showing that this methodology might be used for the elicitation of human behaviour of subjects when facing an emergency. Moreover, the data acquired is of great importance for the fire safety experts designing new buildings or planning strategies to improve emergency paths. Another possible outcome is to create an artificial population based on human beh...

This talk is devoted to the kinetic Kuramoto model, arising in the study of collective synchronized phenomena in a mean-field limit, as the number of oscillators tends to infinity. This model is represented by a scalar conservation law for the distribution function having a non-local flux due to the mean-field interactions among the oscillators. The aim of the talk is to present an analysis of bounded weak solutions for this equation: existence of BV solutions, their stability and their large time behavior. The analysis is based on a modified wave-front tracking algorithm which is suitable for scalar conservation laws with nonlocal terms. This study reveals the interesting phenomena of solutions whose sup-norm may grow to infinity as t goes to infinity.

We analyze a macroscopic model with a maximal density constraint which describes short range repulsion in biological systems. This system aims at modeling finite-size particles which cannot overlap and repel each other when they are too close. The parts of the fluid where the maximal density is reached behave like incompressible fluids while lower density regions are compressible. This paper investigates the transition between the compressible and incompressible regions. To capture this transition, we study a one-dimensional Riemann problem and introduce a perturbation problem which regularizes the compressible-incompressible transition. Specific difficulties related to the non-conservativity of the problem are discussed.

Human beings have been affected by disasters from the beginning of life, bringing them many sad memories. In the long struggle against disaster, people have devised a variety of methods to train relevant participants in disaster relief capabilities. However, many traditional training methods, such as disaster exercises may not provide effective training to meet the need of today. Serious games provide an innovative approach to train participants in disaster relief, and a large number of Serious Games for Disaster Relief (SGDRs) have been developed to train disaster planning and rescue capabilities. At the same time, there is no systematics phase description for disaster relief, which cannot effectively guide participants' work and training in disaster relief. Therefore, this paper proposes a comprehensive and professional disaster relief classification framework according to different relief work in each stage of the disaster. Based on this framework, we review the functions and...

Learning typical motion patterns or activities from videos of crowded scenes is an important visual surveillance problem. To detect typical motion patterns in crowded scenarios, we propose a new method which utilizes the instantaneous motions of a video, i.e, the motion flow field, instead of long-term motion tracks. The motion flow field is a union of independent flow vectors computed in different frames. Detecting motion patterns in this flow field can therefore be formulated as a clustering problem of the motion flow fields, where each motion pattern consists of a group of flow vectors participating in the same process or motion. We first construct a directed neighborhood graph to measure the closeness of flow vectors. A hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithm is applied to group flow vectors into desired motion patterns.

The paper describes a study to characterise vertical dynamic loads and induced effects on a footbridge. The study comprehends the development of a numerical model to characterise the dynamic behaviour of the footbridge, which is experimentally validated and used to numerically simulate the response induced by groups of pedestrians synchronised at critical bridge frequencies. The vandal load associated with a single pedestrian is characterised and the response is calculated considering the measured load, and compared with the measured response to the excitation induced by a single pedestrian or a group with varying dimension. The definition of a general load model for vandal excitation is discussed.

This paper concerns the mathematical modelling of the motion of a crowd in a non connected bounded domain, based on kinetic and stochastic game theories. The proposed model is a mesoscopic probabilistic approach that retains features obtained from both micro-and macro-scale representations; pedestrian interactions with various obstacles being managed from a probabilistic perspective. A proof of the existence and uniqueness of the proposed mathematical model's solution is given for large times. A numerical resolution scheme based on the splitting method is implemented and then applied to crowd evacuation in a non connected bounded domain with one rectangular obstacle. The evacuation time of the room is then calculated by our technique, according to the dimensions and position of a square-shaped obstacle, and finally compared to the time obtained by a deterministic approach by means of randomly varying some of its parameters.

Simulating the motion of realistic, large, dense crowds of autonomous agents is still a challenge for the computer graphics community. Typical approaches either resemble particle simulations (where agents lack orientation controls) or are conservative in the range of human motion possible (agents lack psychological state and aren't allowed to 'push' each other). Our HiDAC system (for High-Density Autonomous Crowds) focuses on the problem of simulating the local motion and global wayfinding behaviors of crowds moving in a natural manner within dynamically changing virtual environments. By applying a combination of psychological and geometrical rules with a social and physical forces model, HiDAC exhibits a wide variety of emergent behaviors from agent line formation to pushing behavior and its consequences; relative to the current situation, personalities of the individuals and perceived social density.

The paper studies the possible blowup of the total variation for entropy weak solutions of the p-system, modeling isentropic gas dynamics. It is assumed that the density remains uniformly positive, while the initial data can have arbitrarily large total variation (measured in terms of Riemann invariants). Two main results are proved. (I) If the total variation blows up in finite time, then the solution must contain an infinite number of large shocks in a neighborhood of some point in the t-x plane. (II) Piecewise smooth approximate solutions can be constructed whose total variation blows up in finite time. For these solutions the strength of waves emerging from each interaction is exact, while rarefaction waves satisfy the natural decay estimates stemming from the assumption of genuine nonlinearity.

Social Force Model (SFM) uses mathematical equations to describe pedestrians intentions and interactions. The crowd behavior is a result of these forces acting in each pedestrian. One of the major disadvantages of SFM is the understanding of the pedestrians intentions that are somewhat hidden in the mathematical equations and its parameters. In this paper we propose the implementation of a fuzzy logic based model called Fuzzy Social Force Model, capable to model and simulate crowd behavior. The proposed model translate the forces modeled by SFM equations into desire and interaction effects described by linguistic expression rules and fuzzy sets. This novel model is easier to parameterize, to extend and it presents the same emerging behaviors of the SFM but with a better interpretability. Our approach also offers a natural way to adjust and modify the pedestrians dynamics for panic, low visibility or other specific situations.

This thesis proposes the use of Serious Games as a behaviour elicitation tool in addition to the traditional methods such as direct observations or statedpreference questionnaires. The resulting knowledge is needed to improve behavioural models of intelligent agents mimicking pedestrians. From the literature review and subsequent gap analysis, a methodological approach was envisaged leading to the Conceptualisation of a novel methodology for human behaviour elicitation coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrians and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics) aimed at revealing human behaviour and capturing the complex activities of pedestrians in the real world. As a case study, the behaviour of pedestrians when searching the best path to exit from a building was chosen. Building egress, or evacuation, has gained increasing interest by the research community, with important implications to architecture and building management, related to safety. Stakeholders, including architects and fire engineers, need simulation tools to validate building safety, namely evacuation simulators. The agent-based evacuation simulators, although attempting to implement some sort of intelligence into the agents mimicking humans, lack realism and knowledge on behavioural aspects related to humans. SPEED proposes to address this problem, using Serious Games. A set of experiments conceived with the help of an international expert panel, based on the Delphi method, were put up to test the methodology. After a pilot test, three experiments were made using Serious Games and questionnaires. The results were statistically analysed evidencing the subjects preferences and applied into an agent-based simulator developed using NetLogo. These agents were modelled by using the peer-designed agents (PDA) concept that emerged recently within the artificial intelligence community. The SPEED approach can be used for knowledge elicitation of pedestrian behaviours in other contexts, besides egress, within social simulation, based on the PDA concept.