Simulating virtual crowds in emergency situations

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a novel approach to simulate virtual human crowds in emergency situations. Our model is based on two previous works, on a physical model proposed by Helbing, where individuals are represented by a particle system affected by "social forces" that impels them to go to a point-objective, while avoiding collisions with obstacles and other agents. As a new property, the virtual agents are endowed with different attributes and individualities as proposed by Braun et al. The main contributions of this paper are the treatment of complex environments and their implications on agents' movement, the management of alarms distributed in space, the virtual agents endowed with perception of emergency events and their consequent reaction as well as changes in their individualities. The prototype reads a XML file where different scenarios can be simulated, such as the characteristics of population, the virtual scene description, the alarm configuration and the properties of hazardous events. As output, the prototype generates information in order to measure the impact of parameters on saved, injured and dead agents. In addition, some results and validation are discussed.

REFERENCES

• 1: J. Allen. Creating cal3d characters with 3d studio max. http://cal3d.sourceforge.net/modeling/tutorial. html, 2004.
• 2: E. Bouvier, E. Cohen, and L. Najman. From crowd simulations to airbag deployment: Particle system, a new paradigm of simulation. Journal of eletronic Imaging, 6(1):94--107, 1997.
• 3: Adriana Braun , Soraia R. Musse , Luiz P. L. de Oliveira , Bardo E. J. Bodmann, Modeling Individual Behaviors in Crowd Simulation, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2003), p.143, May 08-09, 2003
• 4: F. L. F. Devillers, S. Donikian and J. Taille. A programming environment for behavioral animation. The journal of visualization and computer animation, pages 263--274, 2002.
• 5: S. Goldenstein, E. Large, and D. Metaxas. Non-linear dynamical system approach to behavior modeling. The Visual Computer, 15:349--364, 1999.
• 6: D. Helbing, I. Farkas, and T. Vicsek. Simulating dynamical features of escape panic. Nature, 407:487--490, 2000.
• 7: D. Helbing and P. Molnar. Simulating dynamical features of escape panic. In Self-Organization of Complex Structures: From Individual to Collective Dynamics, Londres, 1997. Gordon and Breach.
• 8: R. A. Metoyer and J. Hodgins. Reactive pedestrian path following from examples. The Visual Computer, pages 635--649, 2004.
• 9: Soraia Raupp Musse , Daniel Thalmann, Hierarchical Model for Real Time Simulation of Virtual Human Crowds, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.7 n.2, p.152-164, April 2001 [doi>10.1109/2945.928167]
• 10: D. C. Rapaport, The Art of Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1996
• 11: Craig W. Reynolds, Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model, Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.25-34, August 1987
• 12: Xiaoyuan Tu , Demetri Terzopoulos, Artificial fishes: physics, locomotion, perception, behavior, Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.43-50, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/192161.192170]
• 13: M. B. Villamil, S. R. Musse, and L. P. L. Oliveira. A model for generating and animating groups of virtual agents. In IVA 2003 - Intelligent Virtual Agents, Irsee, Germany, 2003.
• 14: T. Werner and D. Helbing. The social force pedestrian model applied to real life scenarios. In Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics, pages 17--26. CMS Press, 2003.
• 15: D. Zeltzer. Task Level Graphical Simulation: Abstraction, Representation and Control. IDG Books, Chicago, USA, 1991.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Animation

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
behavioral animation, crowd simulation, physically based animation