Simulation of crowd evacuation behavior

• Main Author: Toh, Wen Xiang
• Other Authors: Cai Wentong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138114
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Crowd simulation has been widely applied in various areas such as visual effects, computer games, pedestrian facility management, and evacuation planning. It has been used to simulate different scenarios of crowds at different places, such as evacuation scenarios during emergencies at shopping malls or hospitals, which provides an effective and realistic approach in dealing with evacuation procedures during fire break out in a building. It has also become an efficient tool that can assist the developer and researcher to study the behavior and movement pattern of the crowd in real life. This report presents the crowd simulation results of emergency evacuation scenarios for Singapore City Hall MRT station concourse. Firstly, it covers the development of a crowd simulation model for Singapore City Hall MRT station concourse using VADERE, an open-source crowd simulator software. Then this report shows how the modification to the parameter of the social force model was performed to correct unrealistic crowd movement. After the model parameters were carefully fine-tuned, four algorithms were implemented in order to simulate agent behaviors during crowd evacuation, such as randomization of the agent destination point, reassignment of the agent destination points, improvised reassignment of the agent destination points, and agent aversion behavior. The randomization of the agent destination point algorithm provides the agents with the ability to travel toward different destination point, instead of the same destination points. And in the reassignment of the agent destination point algorithm, it provides the agents with the capability to travel towards a new destination point when encountered with an inaccessible destination point. While the improvised reassignment of agent destination points makes use of signboard to provides agents with the information on inaccessible destination points. And in the agent aversion behavior algorithm, it provides the agents with decision making process capability, to either continue traveling toward the initial assigned destination point or to travel towards a new destination point, upon high crowd density level near the initial destination point. With these implemented algorithms, it provides a better realism towards crowd evacuation in Singapore City Hall MRT station concourse.