Abstract
Crowd models can be used for the simulation of people movement in the built environment. Crowd model outputs have been used for evaluating safety and comfort of pedestrians, inform crowd management and perform forensic investigations. Microscopic crowd models allow the representation of each person and the obtainment of information concerning their location over time and interactions with the physical space/other people. Pandemics such as COVID-19 have posed several questions on safe building usage, given the risk of disease transmission among building occupants. Here we show how crowd modelling can be used to assess occupant exposure in confined spaces. The policies adopted concerning building usage and social distancing during a pandemic can vary greatly, and they are mostly based on the macroscopic analysis of the spread of disease rather than a safety assessment performed at a building level. The proposed model allows the investigation of occupant exposure in buildings based on the analysis of microscopic people movement. Risk assessment is performed by retrofitting crowd models with a universal model for exposure assessment which can account for different types of disease transmissions. This work allows policy makers to perform informed decisions concerning building usage during a pandemic.
Highlights
Any stakeholder dealing with crowds is greatly affected by a pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the most known and used crowd models (Lovreglio et al, 2019) have released new features aimed at microscopic modelling of people movement considering social distancing or counting the interactions between pedestrians in a given social distance radius
In this paper we propose a modelling solution to retrofit any type of microscopic crowd model for pandemic risk assessment studies
Summary
Any stakeholder dealing with crowds is greatly affected by a pandemic. Events involving large crowds have been cancelled or postponed worldwide, access to public buildings has been restricted as different mitigation measures have been adopted around the world to decrease physical interactions among people during the COVID-19 pandemic (Anderson et al, 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the most known and used crowd models (Lovreglio et al, 2019) have released new features aimed at microscopic modelling of people movement considering social distancing or counting the interactions between pedestrians in a given social distance radius While these features are useful to evaluate space usage, given the lack of knowledge concerning the current spread of disease, they do not allow a comprehensive quantitative understanding of the impact of different measures on building occupant exposure. The ground for the development of the model has been the review of the current measures adopted to reduce risk transmission worldwide (e.g. social distancing measures), possible disease transmission mechanisms in confined spaces and the analysis of the characteristics of microscopic crowd modelling tools
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