Research On Crowd Simulation Technologies For Emergency Evacuation

With the rapid development of the 3D animation technology and the hardware computing ability, the crowd simulation technology has growing more and more quickly, especially in the application fields such as fire protection, city planning and architecture design. In recent years, studies to improve crowd safety in places of public assembly involved many disciplines: architectural design for safe egress, crowd planning and management, crowd simulations, emergency planning, leadership training and many others.This thesis researched on the crowd simulation technologies for emergency evacuation, constructed a suit of software tools from modeling to evaluation, involving the following contribution:1) Geometry modeling and real-time rendering on virtual environment, We have implemented a 3D virtual environment geometry modeling software. The users can construct the environment to be simulated with this software and real-time render it out using OGRE engine.2) Hierarchically environmental modeling. The environment was divided into three layers from top to bottom: Topological layer, Perception layer and Path layer, and 2D hierarchical modeling system was developed.3) Behavior animation for autonomous agents. We mainly discussed the steering behaviors of agents in crowd simulation. The virtual pedestrian was considered as a vehicle model influenced by three behaviors: path-following, obstacle-avoidance, and collision-avoidance.4) Crowd simulation evaluation. Based on the emergency evacuation, we extracted three decision factors and two representation factors. This result of evaluation can help architectural design for safe egress and crowd management in emergency evacuation.