SimPed: Simulating Pedestrian Flows in a Virtual Urban Environment

SimPed: Simulating Pedestrian Flows in a Virtual Urban Env...

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http://publish.uwo.ca/~jmalczew/gida_5/Jiang/Jiang.htm

Journal of Geographic Information and Decision Analysis, vol.3, no.1, pp. 21-30, 1999

Bin Jiang Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK [email protected] http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/bin/

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Multi-agent simulation and urban environments 3. Self-organisation and StarLogo 4. A representation of urban environments 5. Simulating pedestrian flows in a virtual urban environment 6. Conclusions and future work References

ABSTRACT This paper presents experiments on pedestrian flows by the use of multi-agent simulations. A range of simulations (SimPed) have been built up for exploring complex pedestrian behaviour in urban environments. In this context, space syntax (Hillier and Hanson 1984) is used as an analytical tool for urban structure analysis. Based on the structure analysis and simulations, it has been found that urban morphological structures have striking impacts on pedestrian movement in urban environments, which conforms to previous relevant empirical studies. Further research is being carried out in order to refine pedestrian behaviour in the decision of route choosing based on visibility analysis. KEYWORDS: urban simulations, virtual environments, human behaviour, multi-agent simulations, urban morphology, GIS.

1. Introduction Recently there has been an increasing interest in looking at urban environments as complexity systems (e.g., Allen 1997), and the notions of self-organisation and fractal cities are frequently utilised to characterise the complexity of urban environments. A range of simulations with cellular automata have been conducted to illustrate the formation of urban morphology, for example, simple rules assigned to local cells could generate global spatial patterns (Batty and Xie 1997, White and Engelen 1997). The complexity of urban environments involves various aspects, but basically two can be identified. The first is concerned with the evolution of urban structure, i.e. the formation of urban form, and the second is more to do with the social activities of humans within urban environments, for instance, the pattern of pedestrian crowds and traffic flows. There have been many efforts in studying the first one in the fields of urban study (e.g., Batty and Longley 1994) and temporal GIS. So far, relatively less effort has been made in the second. In this context, multi-agent simulation seems to be helpful in understanding the complexity of urban environments. Over the past three decades, much research has been carried out in the field of traffic engineering. The main goal of these studies was to develop guidelines for urban planning and design, therefore a number of simulation models have been proposed, e.g. queuing models (Yuhaski and Smith 1989) and models for route choice (Borgers and Timmermans 1986). More recently Helbing and Molnar (1997) have studied pedestrian crowds as self-organised phenomena. However, none of these have ever used the agent-based approach. This paper reports a range of experiments called SimPed using multi-agent simulations for pedestrian flows. The work presented here is part of Virtual Environments for Urban Environments (VENUE) project (Figure 1). The project aims to provide a suite of computer tools for urban design and planning, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a basic platform with links to other information technologies such as visualisation, Internet technology and computer simulations. So far we have built up a range of new functionality such as Axwoman - an ArcView extension for urban morphological analysis (Jiang et al. 1999), 3D VRML models linked to the Internet (Batty et al. 1998), and SimPed reported here.

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Figure 1 The framework of VENUE project

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 briefly describes the model of multi-agent simulation and its link to urban environments. Section 3 is an overview of StarLogo, a computational tool for exploring self-organised systems. Section 4 introduces a representation of urban environments for urban morphological analysis. Section 5 details experiments on pedestrian movement in a virtual urban environment and analysis of the results. Finally section 6 summarises conclusions and proposes future work.

2. Multi-agent Simulation and Urban Environments Multi-agent simulation is developed from the field of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). The baisc idea of multi-agent simulation is that programs exhibit behaviours entirely described by their internal mechanisms. By linking an individual to a program, it is possible to simulate an artificial world inhabited by interacting processes. Thus it is possible to implement simulation by transposing the population of a real system to its artificial counterpart. Each member of population is represented as an agent who has built-in behaviours. Multi-agent simualtion provides a platform to model situations in which there are large numbers of individuals and individuals have complex behaviours. The basic unit of a multi-agent simulation is the agent, where an agent is any actor in a system, any entity that can generate events that affect itself and other agents. Simulations consist of groups of many interacting agents. For instance, any ecosystem could consist of agents representing prey and predator respectively. Drogoul and Ferber (1994) have summarised multi-agent simulation as a set of the following elements: agents, behaviours, objects, environments and communications. Four of them are described by the quadruplet:

where agents are the set of all the simulated individuals, and behaviours are properties of agents; objects are the set of all represented passive entities that do not react to stimuli (e.g., buildings, street furniture in urban environments); environments are the topological space where agents and objects are located, where they can move and act, and where signals (sounds, smell, etc.) propagate; and communications are the set of all communication categories, such as voice, written materials, signs, etc. Applying the paradigm to urban systems, a couple of instances can be devised. Agents can be pedestrians and vehicles; Buildings, shops and museums are objects; The physical open spaces of the urban system can be regarded as environment; and communications can occur either between agents or between agents and their environments. Agents can be characterised by their behaviour in response to their environmental conditions and their neighbouring agents’ status. Thus communication could be considered in various ways, for example, a car sees another car close ahead, it may slow down; a tourist sees a direction sign, he/she may change their current heading. Human activities in urban environments are affected by the urban morphological structure (through the interaction between agents and environments) and by the status of neighbouring agents (through the interaction between agents). Multi-agent simulation has advantages over traditional numerical simulation techniques, which are based on mathematical or stochastic models, usually differential equations. Firstly multi-agent simulation provides impressive visual display with which users (simulation designers) can assess visually agents behaviour in the course of simulation. Secondly, users can dynamically trace how global structure emerge as a result of the agents’ individual interactions. One can use multi-agent simulation to test hypothesis, build up theories, and integrate different partial theories coming from various disciplines.

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3. Self-organisation and StarLogo There have been many efforts in providing software platform for multi-agent simulations. Swarm (Minar et al. 1996) is such a software platform, produced by Santa Fe Institute, for the simulation of complex adaptive systems. It is claimed to be a system that helps scientists focus on research rather than on tool building. In this respect, I believe that StarLogo (Resnick 1997) is exactly the kind of tool for scientists. It is developed from Logo as a programming language for children (Papert 1980). The idea behind StarLogo is so-called self-organisation, i.e. organised without an organiser, and co-ordinated without a co-ordinator. Orderly patterns can arise from location interaction between agents, and between agents and environments. The idea is not new as many computer models have such functions. Among others, cellular automata (CA) is probably the most influential in this respect. In CA, a virtual world is arranged as a grid of "cells". Each cell holds a certain state, e.g. "alive" or "dead". Each cell is also assigned transition rules, for example, a cell becomes "alive", if the majority of its neighbouring cells are "alive", and in the same way a cell becomes "dead" if the majority of neighbouring cells are "dead". StarLogo has developed this idea, and incorporated three main types of characters in the virtual world: patches, turtles, and observer as in Figure 2. Turtles are the main inhabitants of the StarLogo world. Patches are the world in which the turtles live. Patches are arranged in a grid with the original co-ordinate in the centre. One can specify the size of patches and size of the environment according to the size of the turtles. If one likes to have the agents to look relatively realistic, then large patches are desirable. StarLogo can be regarded as a cellular-automata world with turtles roaming around on top. Both the patches and the turtles have a certain look, while the observer is invisible. Therefore it is like God, you cannot see it but it is there in the heart of believers. The observer is responsible for creating the turtles and patches and to monitor the activities of the turtles and patches.

Figure 2 Three characters of StarLogo

StarLogo is a programmable environment, and it provides a lot of procedures of patches / turtles / observer to build up various applications, for instance, for creating turtles and defining the behaviour of turtles such as heading, movement and so on; for statistical analysis involving arithmetic functions; for visualisation like colour, data input / output and animation etc.. It also allows users to develop their own procedures. StarLogo language is a procedural language, and each procedure fulfills certain functions. The basic syntax is as follows: ::= * | ( * )

::= * | | | | | ( )

::= [ * ]

::= " ::= |

::=

::= :

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Except that there is also infix arithmetic with + - * / = < > in the usual way. Using StarLogo, one can produce applications with a friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) linking to individual procedures, e.g. a button named "setup" links to a procedure "to setup". In the graphics window, one can watch the emerging patterns. Thus StarLogo provides innovative computational tools for exploring complex dynamic phenomena. Now let's examine how StarLogo fits into the basic principle of multi-agent simulations as described above. First of all, turtles are the basic agents. In addition, breeds are alternative agents in case more than one type of agent are needed. For instance, one might want foxes and rabbits in an ecology model, or antibodies and antigens in an immunology model. Secondly, objects in the StarLogo virtual worlds are identified by the location (x, y). Thirdly, patches are environments, which are usually identified by colours. For instance, if a road is coloured by grey, it can be used to limit a virtual pedestrian wandering around in the road. Finally, communications are achieved through the procedure ask (who, what), and they occur between turtles, between turtles and patches, and between patches and patches.

4. A Representation of Urban Environments The structure of the environment that agents live in is of importance for studying self-organised patterns. Here an approach to the representation of urban environments is presented by concentrating on open spaces. The approach is termed as space syntax, which has a long tradition in urban studies (Hillier and Hanson 1984, Hillier 1996). More recently it has been brought to the GIS community as the potential for new functionality for spatial analysis (Jiang 1998, Jiang et al. 1999).

Figure 3 An urban environment and its axial representation

Having a look at the urban system on the left in Figure 3, the open spaces are all interconnected, and one can travel from any point to any other point. It is this kind of characteristics that gives space syntax its unique position in modelling urban environments. One of the space syntax approaches is to represent open space as the longest straight lines. The whole urban system is crossed with the least number of longest axial lines, producing so called axial map (the model on the right in Figure 3). Taking each street segment as a node and each intersection as the edge, a related graph can be created. Based on the graph, a range of morphological parameters are derived. Among others, the following are important: - the connectivity Cj of a line i is defined as the number of lines connected to that line. In the derived graph, it is equal to the number of nodes directly linked to each individual node; - the control value crtli of a line i is defined as a measure expressing the degree of choice each line represents for its immediate neighbours as a line to move to, it is defined as

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- the depth MDi of a line i measures its integration degree within the graph, it is defined as

- the last significant measure is integration. The integration of a line is a value which indicates the degree to which a line is more integrating, or segregating, from the system as a whole. It is measured with either Relative Asymmetry (RA), or Real Relative Asymmetry (RRA) as follows and where Dn is so called D-values, and it is the function of the number of space of a system. Since the calculation of RA or RRA corresponds to all parts of the system, that is, all lines are traversed to obtain MD, it is called global integration. The same analysis can be made at more local levels, if a number of steps, instead of all steps, are considered. In this situation, the integration is referred to as local integration. It has been found that pedestrian movement rates in urban environments are highly correlated to the local integration (Hillier et al. 1993). In the following simulation, we will compare local integration and pedestrian movement rates in order to examine the assumption that morphological structure has some impact on people’s movement.

5. SimPed: Simulating Pedestrian Flows in a Virtual Urban Environment As mentioned, the basic hypothesis to test is whether morphological structure has some impact on pedestrian movement in urban environments. To achieve this goal, a virtual urban environment with virtual humans is constructed using mulit-agent simulation. Such virtual worlds offer many advantages (Resnick 1997). In virtual worlds it is easy to create large number of virtual humans, it is easy to give new sensory capabilities to the humans, and it is easy to set up and control precise experiemental conditions. In this particular virtual world, a set of instances corresponding to the elements of multi-agent simulations is designed (Table 1). Agents are pedestrians with the behaviours of speed, heading and movement; objects are churches, hotels, monuments, post offices etc.; the physical urban space looks rather regular consisting of 21 streets as shown in Figure 3. The simulation (SimPed) is built upon StarLogo as introduced in the previous section.

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Table 1 A set of instances in the SimPed Elements of multi-agent simulations

Instances

Agents

pedestrian behaviour: speed (up | down) heading (0-360) movement (forward | backward)

Objects

church, hotel, monument, post office, school, library, park etc.

Environments

urban space with 21 streets in figure 3

Communications

between red people between red people and the urban environment Figure 4 A snapshot of the simulation in progress (pedestrians moving randomly)

The simulation consists of two parts as shown in Figure 4. The right hand is a graphic representation of the virtual urban environment, within which pedestrians are pictured as red. The left hand is the control panel. The setup button creates the number of pedestrians walking in the urban environment. There are two continuous walk button namely walk-randomly, and walk-purposely. These two buttons set two different modes of the simulation. The former is random movement, while the latter is purposing movement, which means pedestrians have set destinations to reach. In addition, a set of monitor tools are used to dynamically record pedestrians every moment in each street for analytical analysis. Behind what you see on the screen is a range of procedures which keep the simulation running. The following are some key procedures to setup die setpedestrians number stopwalk-button end To check-no-kerb if (pc-at dx dy) > 6 [seth (45 * random 8) check-no-kerb ] end to move-pedestrian if 0 = random 8 [set (45 * random 8)] check-no-kerb jump speed end to check-street1 output count-turtles-with [(xcor >= -33) and (xcor = -33) and (ycor