Abstract
This paper presents an approach for the automatic abstraction of built environments needed for pedestrian dynamics from any building configuration. The approach assesses the usability of navigation mesh to perform realistically pedestrian simulation considering the physical structure and pedestrian abilities for it. Several steps are examined including the creation of a navigation mesh, space subdivision, border extraction, height map identification, stairs classification and parametrisation, as well as pedestrian simulation. A social-force model is utilised to simulate the interactions between pedestrians and an environment. To perform quickly different 2D/3D geometrical queries various spatial indexing techniques are used, allowing fast identification of navigable spaces and proximity checks related to avoidance of people and obstacles in built environments. For example, for a moderate size building having eight floors and a net area of 13,000 m2, it takes only 104 s to extract the required building information to run a simulation. This approach can be used for any building configuration extracting automatically needed features to run pedestrian simulations. In this way, architects, urban planners, fire safety engineers, transport modellers and many other users without the need to manually interact with a building model can perform immediately crowd simulations.
Highlights
Crowd simulation has become a research field for many scientists in areas of computer graphics, emergency management, transport and urban planning, etc
We concentrate on the structure representation, where the primary focus is on a quick automatic extraction and subdivision of navigable spaces for simulation of people dynamics in 3D indoor environments
Seven methodological approaches including cellular automata, social force, lattice gas, fluid dynamics, agent-based, game theories and approaches based on experiments with animals are identified [11]
Summary
Crowd simulation has become a research field for many scientists in areas of computer graphics, emergency management, transport and urban planning, etc. We concentrate on the structure representation, where the primary focus is on a quick automatic extraction and subdivision of navigable spaces for simulation of people dynamics in 3D indoor environments. Seven methodological approaches including cellular automata, social force, lattice gas, fluid dynamics, agent-based, game theories and approaches based on experiments with animals are identified [11] Some of these models such as cellular automata and lattice gas require discrete space, others are continuous such as social force and fluid dynamics suiting more the proposed method. Recent advances in technology enable a quick acquisition of 3D data and the generation of indoor navigable spaces [12] These come in addition to detailed BIM models, which are becoming increasingly available, enabling efficient indoor path planning considering the environment and obstacles [13,14].
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