Agent Based Simulation for Pedestrian Movement during Panic Situation
Evacuation is the movement of people from a dangerous to a safer location. To minimize casualties during a panic situation, building design should consider evacuation plans . An evacuation process is complicated and interrupted by irregular behavior, pedestrians’ or agents’ characteristics, time limit and the surrounding environment. The computer simulation software SimWalk was used in this study to plan for an evacuation during a panic situation. It is revealed that when the bottleneck occurred, pedestrians would collide with each other, hence increasing the friction between them.
Pervasive computing comes to provide human-centric services, facilitating user interaction. These services are essentially context-aware which require complex, heterogeneous infrastructures containing numerous sensors and actuators configured for in-door environments, called ?smart spaces?. One challenge in expanding such services is the complexity of these environments, requiring a significant amount of time to set-up and configure. In this paper we introduce an approach for providing assistance to remote users who can interface with the smart space either by using mobile devices, or by using a cut-down version of the ?smart space? with only a few simple but essential sensors. Furthermore we describe how this approach has been incorporated in a prototype non-intrusive human-centric application, providing assistance in the case of meetings, lectures and presentations called ?Memory Jog?.