Simulation-aided crowd management: A multi-scale model for an urban case study

Safety, security, and comfort of pedestrian crowds during large gatherings are heavily influenced by the layout of the underlying environment. This work presents a systematic agent-based simulation approach to appraise and optimize the layout of a pedestrian environment in order to maximize safety, security, and comfort. The performance of the approach is demonstrated based on annual “Salone del mobile” (Design Week) exhibition in Milan, Italy. Given the large size of the scenario and the proportionally high number of simultaneously present pedestrians, the computational costs of a pure microscopic simulation approach would make this hardly applicable, whereas a multi-scale approach, combining simulation models of different granularity, provides a reasonable trade off between a detailed management of individual pedestrians and possibility to effectively carry out what-if analyses with different environmental configurations. The paper will introduce the scenario, the base model and the alternatives, discussing the achieved results.