Abstract: Current studies of outdoor thermal comfort are limited to calculating thermal indices or interviewing people. The first method does not take into account the way people use this space, whereas the second one is limited to one particular study area. Simulating people’s thermal perception along with their activities in public urban spaces will help architects and city planners to test their concepts and to design smarter and more liveable cities. In this paper, we propose an agent-based modelling approach to simulate people’s adaptive behaviour in space. Two levels of pedestrian behaviour are considered: reactive and proactive, and three types of thermal adaptive behaviour of pedestrians are modelled with single-agent scenarios: speed adaptation, thermal attraction/repulsion and vision-motivated route alternation. An "accumulated heat stress" parameter of the agent is calculated during the simulation, and pedestrian behaviour is analysed in terms of its ability to reduce the accumulated heat stress. This work is the first step towards the "human component" in urban microclimate simulation systems. We use these simulations to drive the design of real-life experiments, which will help calibrating model parameters, such as the heat-speed response, thermal sensitivity and admissible turning angles.

Abstract: Animal groups provide paradigmatic examples of collective phenomena in which repeated interactions among individuals produce dynamic patterns and responses on a scale larger than individuals themselves. For instance, many swarming behaviors yield protective strategies for a groups undergoing a predator’s attack. The effectiveness of these evasive maneuvers is striking given: (i) the decentralized nature of such responses, (ii) the short time scales involved, and (iii) the competitive biological and physiological advantages of predators—e.g., in terms of size, speed, sensory capabilities—as compared to fleeing agents. Here, we report on results of agent-based simulations of collective anti-predatory response. Our prime goal is to gain insight into the nontrivial effect of sociality—a measure of the amount of social interaction—on the effectiveness of the collective response. Specifically, we characterize the responsiveness of the swarm by simulating a predator attack and measuring the survival rate of agents depending on their level of sociality for different interaction rules, based on either a metric or a topological interaction distance. Furthermore, evolutionary pressure selects strategies optimal for the individual and not necessarily for the group. This possibility has been explored by running evolutionary simulations. Interestingly, the results obtained clearly show the existence of an optimal anti-predatory response for a given amount of sociality, regardless of the interaction distance considered. The results of the evolutionary dynamics highlights the fact that the evolution of the distribution of sociality caused by the selective pressure of a predator’s attack has a phenomenology that cannot be derived from the short-time predator avoidance results.

Abstract: Overcrowding in mass rapid transit stations is a chronic issue affecting daily commute in Metro Manila, Philippines. As a high-capacity public transportation, the Metro Rail Transit has been operating at a level above its intended capacity of 350,000 passengers daily. Despite numerous efforts in implementing an effective crowd control scheme, it still falls short in containing the formation of crowds and long lines, thus affecting the amount of time before they can proceed to the platforms. A crowd dynamics model of commuters in one of the high-volume terminal stations, the Taft Ave station, was developed to help discover emergent behavior in crowd formation and assess infrastructure preparedness. The agent-based model uses static floor fields derived from the MRT3 live feed, and implements a number of social force models to optimize the path-finding of the commuter agents. Internal face validation, historical validation and parameter variability-sensitivity analysis were employed to validate the crowd dynamics model and assess different operational scenarios. It was determined that during peak hours, when the expected crowd inflow may reach up to 7,500 commuters, at least 11 ticket booths and 6 turnstiles should be open to have low turnaround times of commuters. For non-peak hours, at least 10 ticket booths and 5 turnstiles are needed to handle a crowd inflow reaching up to 5,000 commuters. In the current set-up, the usual number of ticket booths open in the MRT Taft Station is 11, and there are usually 6 turnstiles open. It was observed that as the crowd inside the station increases to 200-250 commuters, there is a significant increase in the increase rate of the turnaround times of the commuters, which signifies the point at which the service provided starts to degrade and when officials should start to intervene.

Abstract: The success of refugee support operations depends on the ability of humanitarian organizations and governments to deploy aid eectively. These operations require that decisions on resource allocation are made as quickly as possible in order to respond to urgent crises and, by antici- pating future developments, remain adequate as the situation evolves. Agent-based modeling and simulation has been used to understand the progression of past refugee crises, as well as a way to predict how new ones will unfold. In this work, we tackle the problem of refugee aid deployment as a variant of the Robust Facility Location Problem (RFLP). We present a serious video game that functions as an interface for an agent-based simulation run with data from past refugee crises. Having obtained good approximate solutions to the RFLP by implementing a game that frames the problem as a puzzle, we adapted its mechanics and interface to correspond to refugee situations. The game is intended to be played by both subject matter experts and the general public, as a way to crowd-source eective courses of action in these situations.

Abstract: This paper presents the research on the influence of obstacles on crowd dynamics. We have performed experiments for four base scenarios of interaction in crowd: unidirectional flow, bidirectional flow, merging flows and intersection. Movement of pedestrians has been studied in simple shape areas: straight corridor, T-junction and intersection. The volumes and basic directions of pedestrian flows were determined for each of the areas. Layout of physical obstacles has been built from different combinations of columns and barriers. In order to acquire characteristics of the crowd dynamics a set of simulations was conducted using PULSE simulation environment. In the result, we have managed to obtain several dependences between layout of obstacles and crowd dynamics were obtained.