Towards evaluating architectural design of ancient pilgrimage site using agent based modelling and simulation

Abstract

In India, there are many ancient pilgrimage sites with high religious significance. These sites experience a huge surge of crowd on auspicious occasions. The old infrastructure of these pilgrimage sites is not capable to accommodate present crowded situations. Nowadays, these sites are getting congested due to the encroachment on the nearby areas. These conditions make them vulnerable to tragic incidents. Modelling and simulation technology provides a platform to do the comprehensive assessment of architectural designs on different crowded situations. In this paper, we have created near to real virtual environment of an ancient pilgrimage site in an Agent Based Modelling tool. We have created intelligent agents that act, react and interact within this virtual environment. The crowd of intelligent agents are simulated for three different emergency evacuation scenarios and two different dimensions of gates. Subsequently, we explored the effect on emergency evacuation time with respect to dimensions of gates, location of gates and population size inside the temple. The simulation results establish the applicability of our methodology.