Pedestrian Simulation

The UAF has been developed in conjunction with Crowd Dynamics, the leading authority on pedestrian modelling concepts with over 20 years experience and a worldwide portfolio of public and private sector clients. Existing users of Crowd Dynamics technology include the Metropolitan Police Office, London Beijing Olympic Stadium design team and the Sydney Olympic organisers, Canary Wharf, Millennium Stadium, Wembley Stadium, Transport for London, Stockholm Municipality, Government of Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur City, Alstom, Porterbrook and Bombardier Transportation, and Barclay's bank.

The pedestrian movement in the UAF is based on the pedestrian/crowd simulation developed by Prof. Keith Still in 1990 and published in his Thesis “Crowd Dynamics” in August 2000. This was developed further over the years for such projects as the annual pilgrimage to Makkah, London New Year Events, Street Crossing Analysis and Evacuation systems.

The mathematical description of the UAF pedestrian behaviour is outlined below:

Suppose we have N entities, with an entity i at position (xi, yi) inside a region R of the plane R2, representing the accessible parts of a complex space. Each entity's path Pi through the building is constrained: first, by the entity's speed distribution, and secondly by the requirement that entity i visit certain places or subregions of the space in some order. Call the set of all these constraints on the entity i's path Ci.

There are also non-collision constraints Kij which asserts that entities i and j cannot occupy the same position at the same time. There is a cost function u(Pi) for example, length, total time, effort. For a set P of paths Pi satisfying constraints Ci and Kij, there is a total cost U(P) = u(P1) + ... + u(Pn). The algorithm minimizes U(P) subject to those constraints, thereby finding the set of paths that requires the least effort (in total). Iteration is used, starting from a set of paths P, randomly varying them, seeing if the cost goes down, and if so choosing the cheaper set of paths; then repeat. The algorithm stops when it fails to improve the solution.

By allowing local decision making principles, the pedestrian algorithm has been adapted to cope with shared space, whilst not deterring from the underlying algorithm and key principles.

For over 10 years Prof. G Keith Still, Crowd Dynamics CTO, has been teaching the principles of Crowd Dynamics/crowd modelling at the UK Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College and runs workshops on crowd safety and crowd modelling around the world. Crowd Dynamics have advised at a Govt. Level in the UK, Australia and America (testifying at the Senate House Committee on the May 11th Capitol Building evacuation and the post-mortem analysis of the 9/11 terrorist attacks), advised on evacuation of the Singapore Govt. Buildings and the Sydney Olympic pedestrian/transport planning. Crowd Dynamics have deployed systems for London New Year real-time predictive crowd analysis, real-time Command and Control for the evacuation of Canary Wharf and have worked with Police and Local authorises around the world. They are currently modelling on the UK Guidance on terminal designs with the RSSB.

Most notably Prof. Still and his Crowd Dynamics model are used by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the modelling of the Jamarat Bridge (requiring the simulation of over 3,000,000 people during a single day) and more recently the Holy Mosque in Makkah. Prof. Still has been a Govt. Level consultant and Special Advisor to the Saudi Authorities from 2001 advising, modelling and teaching on many of their safety related projects using Crowd Dynamics modelling tools.

More information about Prof. Still's Crowd Dynamics model can be found in his full PhD thesis describing this breakthrough simulation methodology. To date over 40,000 scientists and researchers worldwide have accessed this invaluable resource and Still’s work is cited in more than a dozen text books as one of the primary reference points for pedestrian simulation.

The UAF is based on the Crowd Dynamics Ltd Myriad II Crowd movement algorithm, which has been validated in use on many real-life projects across the world and is derived from modifications to a peer-reviewed and validated PhD by Prof. Keith Still. It was developed through intensive work and studies in Saudi Arabia. This work was extensively reviewed by an international team of experts and independently validated in 2004 in Riyadh.

Refs:

Fruin, J. Pedestrian and Planning Design. Metropolitan Association of Urban Designers and Environmental Planners. 1971. Library of Congress catalogue number 70-159312 (Elevator World Inc. Educational Services Division. PO Box 6507, 354 Morgan Avenue, Mobile, Alabama 36606))

Ando, K. Aoki, T, Oto, H. Improvement of the simulation System for Passenger flow. Spring 1991 Quarterly review of the Rail Technical Research Institute Report. Japan (In Japanese)

Ando, K. Aoki, T, Oto, H. Development of the prediction System for Passenger Flow. Spring 1992 Quarterly Review of the Rail Technical Research Institute Report. Japan (In Japanese)

Aoki, T. The simulation system of passenger flow. Quarterly Review of Rail Technical Research Institute Vol 35 No 2 May 1994.

Thompson, P. Marchant. EW. Modelling Techniques for Evacuation. Engineering for Crowd Safety (Ed Smith RA, Dickie J) Elsevier. (1993) ISBN 0 444 899200.

Pheasant. S. Bodyspace. Taylor and Francis. 1998 (ISBN 0748403264). ErgoBase from the Biomechanics Corporation of America, Inc. is database of the world population sizes, dimensions and aerobic work from Bodyspace.

Still G. K. New Computer system can predict human behaviour response to building fires. Fire 84 (January 1993), 40-41

Still G. K. Simulating Egress using Virtual Reality - a perspective view of simulation and design. IMAS Fire Safety on Ships symposium (May 1994).