Simulating Virtual Humans Crowds in Facilities

The area of crowd simulation has been widely explored in several contexts from entertainment to safety purposes. In this paper we present an approach to simulate the evacuation of crowds in facilities such as hospitals, geriatric clinics, orphanages and etc, where agents adopt different profiles, e.g. workers, patients and families. We use Snook tables to parametrize the effort of people to push patients impacting the people speed when evacuating in this specific context. This model can be applied in games, although our main goal is to contribute with safety systems by computing evacuation times and finding out the number of trained people needed in different scenarios. To control the motion of people in crowds and to avoid collisions we use BioCrowds, but any other crowd simulator could be used as well. Results indicate that the total evacuation time is reduced by having more trained workers, smaller hospital floors and an approximately similar number of rescuers and dependents number of patients and rescuers. In addition, we compare our method with another simulation in a hospital and obtained results were coherent.