Real-time micro-modelling of city evacuations

Abstract

A methodology to integrate geographical information system (GIS) data with large-scale pedestrian simulations has been developed. Advances in automatic data acquisition and archiving from GIS databases, automatic input for pedestrian simulations, as well as scalable pedestrian simulation tools have made it possible to simulate pedestrians at the individual level for complete cities in real time. An example that simulates the evacuation of the city of Barcelona demonstrates that this is now possible. This is the first step towards a fully integrated crowd prediction and management tool that takes into account not only data gathered in real time from cameras, cell phones or other sensors, but also merges these with advanced simulation tools to predict the future state of the crowd.