Urban Walkability Design Using Virtual Population Simulation

Abstract

We present a system to generate a procedural environment that produces a desired crowd behaviour. Instead of altering the behavioural parameters of the crowd itself, we automatically alter the environment to yield such desired crowd behaviour. This novel inverse approach is useful both to crowd simulation in virtual environments and to urban crowd planning applications. Our approach tightly integrates and extends a space discretization crowd simulator with inverse procedural modelling. We extend crowd simulation by goal exploration (i.e. agents are initially unaware of the goal locations), variable-appealing sign usage and several acceleration schemes. We use Markov chain Monte Carlo to quickly explore the solution space and yield interactive design. We have applied our method to a variety of virtual and real-world locations, yielding one order of magnitude faster crowd simulation performance over related methods and several fold improvement of crowd indicators.