urbanEXODUS pedestrian-vehicle interaction
urbanEXODUS, developed by the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) of the University of Greenwich, is an advanced agent based model capable of simulating urban-scale evacuation. The software links, for the first time, urban-scale agent based pedestrian modelling with traffic models and wildfire models. The software is capable of representing tens of thousands of individual agents, thousands of vehicles stretching over many square kilometres interacting with wildfires and other hazards such as floods, earthquakes, chemical spills and terrorism. urbanEXODUS can read street geometries from open source resources such as, Googlemaps and Open Street Maps (OSM). The software:
• Links to disaster management systems to provide situational awareness information for the Common Operating Picture (COP) allowing incident managers to quickly assimilate evacuation information.
• Can accept terrain information from and Digital Elevation Model Ordinance Survey (DEM OS) Terrain 50. This allows terrain information relating to gradients and surface type to be incorporated into the evacuation simulation with the simulated agents reacting appropriately to the terrain.
• Couples with wildfire models such as PHOENIX, FARSITE, PROMETHEUS, SPARKS AND WILDFIRE ANALYST. This enables the advancing fire front to impact the nature of the vehicle and pedestrian evacuation. Escape route for pedestrians and vehicles can become compromised by the advancing fire front making evacuation difficult or impossible.
• Couples with the open source, agent based road traffic simulation model SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility), developed by the Institute of Transportation Systems at the German Aerospace Centre.
The video demonstrates the pedestrian-vehicle interaction. The simulation is produced by urbanEXODUS and the animation is produced by vrEXODUS. The simulated pedestrians within urbanEXODUS are aware of the vehicles and respond to vehicles and the vehicles are aware of the pedestrians and respond to the pedestrians. This enables realistic interactions between pedestrians and vehicles to be represented within the simulation environment.
For example, in the video note how the pedestrians attempt to cross the road and how the vehicles react to the pedestrians. It should be noted that SUMO does not know anything about the pedestrians. All the pedestrian-vehicle and vehicle-pedestrian interaction is controlled from within urbanEXODUS