3D Indoor Environment Abstraction for Crowd Simulations in Complex Buildings

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for the automatic abstraction of built environments needed for pedestrian dynamics from any building configuration. The approach assesses the usability of navigation mesh to perform realistically pedestrian simulation considering the physical structure and pedestrian abilities for it. Several steps are examined including the creation of a navigation mesh, space subdivision, border extraction, height map identification, stairs classification and parametrisation, as well as pedestrian simulation. A social-force model is utilised to simulate the interactions between pedestrians and an environment. To perform quickly different 2D/3D geometrical queries various spatial indexing techniques are used, allowing fast identification of navigable spaces and proximity checks related to avoidance of people and obstacles in built environments. For example, for a moderate size building having eight floors and a net area of 13,000 m2, it takes only 104 s to extract the required building information to run a simulation. This approach can be used for any building configuration extracting automatically needed features to run pedestrian simulations. In this way, architects, urban planners, fire safety engineers, transport modellers and many other users without the need to manually interact with a building model can perform immediately crowd simulations.

CSS for CVR: A Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle-Based Crowd Simulation System for Non-Playable Character Movement of Campus Virtual Reality

“…Fig. 8 shows the campus map and various objects supporting the simulation environment, separating objects into static and dynamic [32]. Buildings and grass become static objects that agents cannot pass through, while roads become dynamic objects that help identify a space that can be continuously navigated.…”

First Responders Space Subdivision Framework for Indoor Navigation

“…Depending on the application, subdivisions can be done on 2D or 3D levels [16]. As found in [17], there are certain advantages and disadvantages of conducting 2D and 3D subdivisions. The key advantages of 2D subdivision are that all or most calculations may be performed in 2D, the user can retain just places occupied by pedestrians in memory, and triangles are not required for vertical pedestrian placement.…”

3d Indoor-Pedestrian Interaction in Emergencies: A Review of Actual Evacuations and Simulation Models

“…In order to simulate the 3D indoor-pedestrian interaction, 3D spatial information related to indoor environments is required and imperative, which can be adopted to generate realistic environmental contexts and create a 3D operational virtual space for reproducing pedestrian evacuations (Ghawana et al, 2018). 3D spatial information has been generated and extracted in existing studies, particularly indoor evacuation and navigation domains (Xiong et al, 2017;Gorte et al, 2019;Zlatanova et al, 2020;Aleksandrov et al, 2021). For instance, Aleksandrov et al (2021) automated the abstraction of indoor environments required for pedestrian evacuation simulation.…”

“…3D spatial information has been generated and extracted in existing studies, particularly indoor evacuation and navigation domains (Xiong et al, 2017;Gorte et al, 2019;Zlatanova et al, 2020;Aleksandrov et al, 2021). For instance, Aleksandrov et al (2021) automated the abstraction of indoor environments required for pedestrian evacuation simulation. In terms of navigation domains, 3D indoor navigation, 3D seamless indoor/outdoor navigation, path computation considering movable obstacles, etc.…”