Designing crowd safety: Agent-based pedestrian simulations in the early, collaborative design stages

Contemporary agent-based pedestrian simulations offer great potential to evaluate architectural and urban design proposals in terms of medical risks, crowd safety, and visitor comfort. Nevertheless, due to their relative computational heaviness and complicated input-parameters, pedestrian simulations are not employed during the design process commonly. Simulation results significantly impact planning decisions, especially when they are already available in the early design phases. This paper analyzes the requirements of pedestrian simulations for early planning stages, such as seamless integration into iterative and collaborative design processes, interactivity, and appropriate visualization of results. For this purpose, we combine two existing projects: a high-accuracy pedestrian simulation and the CDP//Collaborative Design Platform. To adapt the simulation method to the requirements of early planning stages, we investigate interactions that blend intuitively with the design process and enable multiple users to interact simultaneously. We simplify simulations' input parameters to match the level of detail of the early design phases. The simulation model is adapted to facilitate continuous and spontaneous interactions. Furthermore, we develop visualization techniques to support initial design negotiations and present strategies for compensating computation time and giving constant feedback to a dynamic design process.