Development of an online tool for crowd movement simulation research

Crowds are everywhere and studying them is important for urban planning, transportation, evacuation, and safety at large public events. Simulation modelling lets us study crowd behaviour by simulating large numbers of individual pedestrians and seeing how they behave as a crowd in different, sometimes dangerous scenarios. Simulation allows us to study situations that would be impossible with live experiments. There are already many models covering some or all parts of pedestrian movement and crowd behaviour, but there are only a few open-source platforms using them for crowd simulation modelling. Most of those that exist require good knowledge of programming to use, and none are web-based. This project will produce an accessible, online, and open-source crowd simulation platform that can benefit researchers and professionals alike. The project will include the calibration and validation of this model, ensuring a certain quality of simulation, and will also involve a case study using the platform to simulate emergency evacuation inside a public transport station.

Faculty Supervisor:

Liliana Perez

Student:

Partner:

SYSTRA Canada Inc

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Université de Montréal

Program: