01623121

Component

Computational approaches for crowd analysis and environment design need robust measures for characterizing the relation between environments and crowd flow. Level of service (LoS) is a standard indicator for characterizing the service afforded by environments to pedestrian crowds of specific densities, and is widely used in crowd management and urban design. However, current LoS indicators are qualitative and rely on expert analysis. In this paper, the authors perform a systematic analysis of LoS for synthetic crowds. The flow-density relationships in crowd evacuation scenarios are explored with respect to three state-of-the-art steering algorithms. The authors' results reveal that LoS is sensitive to the crowd behavior, and the configuration of the environment benchmark. Following this study, the authors automatically optimize environment elements to maximize crowd flow, under a range of LoS conditions. The steering algorithm, the number of optimized environment elements,the scenario configuration and the LoS conditions affect the optimal configuration of environment elements. The authors observe that the critical density of crowd simulators increases due to the optimal placement of pillars, thereby effectively increasing the LoS of environments at higher crowd densities. Depending on the simulation technique and environment benchmark, pillars are configured to produce lanes or form wall-like structures, in an effort to maximize crowd flow. These experiments serve as an important precursor to computational crowd optimization and management and motivate the need for further study using additional real and synthetic crowd datasets across a larger representation of environment benchmarks.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF00 Section - Pedestrians and Cycles.

01618707

17-03865

English

18p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Built environment; Crowds; Evacuation; Level of service; Optimization; Pedestrian flow

Synthetic data

Design; Operations and Traffic Management; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-03865

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 11:29AM