Scripting Scenarios of Pedestrian Behavior in a Computer Simulator of Security Monitoring System: A Practitioner’s Perspective

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the AvatarTraffic simulator – a computer system capable of modelling in real time environments such as subway stations or airport halls populated with tens or hundreds of moving figures, which, in addition to pedestrian traffic typical for this type of objects, can perform predefined sequences of events and actions formulated as a simulation scenario. Thanks to the integration with a real monitoring system, the simulator, in addition to providing data streams (including video) generated by the virtual scene, is also able to dynamically respond to actions taken by the system’s staff. Using the Unity simulation engine as the implementation platform, a number of practical problems had to be solved during the development, two of which are the subject of this article: a) supervising and correcting the work of AI algorithms used in Unity to simulate the pedestrian movement of avatars, and b) a textual description of the scenario of events taking place on the stage in a way editable for experts planning tests of the monitoring system. Some more challenging cases of people movement are discussed (including creating queues and passing through doors) and the paper presents original algorithms correcting the work of the Unity’s built-in methods in the situations when the coordinated behaviour of people groups is required. Because of the specifics of the simulator environment the scenario needed to be expressed in a JSON text file, and the article presents the implemented mechanisms of its compilation directly to the C# runtime environment and discusses the original command language which was created to model sequences of events and actions making up the scenario.