Multi agent simulation of pedestrian behavior in closed spatial environments

Abstract

Agent-based simulations show their potential in many context of transport management in presence of unusual demand, such as airport passenger terminals, railway stations, urban pedestrian areas, public buildings, street events or open space exhibitions, where management or control by related authorities and public safety are strongly affected by spatial geometry and crowd behavior. We illustrate these ideas with an example based on the simulation of people visiting and evacuating a museum, which offers an excellent test environment for simulating a collective behavior emerging from local movements in a closed space. The model we apply is developed within a programmable modeling environment, NetLogo, designed for simulating time-evolution of complex systems. We verify the existing emergency plan for building evacuation, for different demand patterns such as visiting group size and inter-arrival times, and we compare it with alternative evacuation strategies looking for the optimal one. In this respect, we further demonstrate the effectiveness of agent-based simulations in finding emergent results difficult to be predicted.