Multi-scale simulation for crowd management: a case study in an urban scenario

Abstract

Safety, security, and comfort of pedestrian crowds during large gatherings are heavily influenced by the layout of the underlying environment. This work presents a systematic agent-based simulation approach to appraise and optimize the layout of a pedestrian environment in order to maximize safety, security, and comfort. The performance of the approach is demonstrated based on annual ``Salone del mobile'' (Design Week) exhibition in Milan, Italy. Given the large size of the scenario, and the proportionally high number of simultaneously present pedestrians, the computational costs of a pure microscopic simulation approach would make this hardly applicable, whereas a multi-scale approach, combining simulation models of different granularity, provides a reasonable trade off between a detailed management of individual pedestrians and possibility to effectively carry out what-if analyses with different environmental configurations. The paper will introduce the scenario, the base model and the alternatives discussing the achieved results.