5. Application of Crowd Simulation for a Layout Improvement

This chapter presents a creative experiment, where a series of simulations in Crowd-Z have been used for improvement of an architectural floor-plan. As an example one floor of a retail store has been used for this experiment. A simple scenario of crowd passing from the entrance towards the exit has been implemented. The objective is to possibly uniform the usage of space, in other words to reduce the number of unvisited areas and congestion in other places. Two types of layout elements are introduced: fixed and modifiable. The fixed elements represent structural members such as construction walls, pillars, other unmodifiable elements such as elevators, escalators, etc. The modifiable elements represent partition walls, sale stands, etc. The heat maps (HMs) are used to determine the use of spaces. A semi-totalistic two-dimensional cellular automaton has been defined to “melt” modifiable elements of the layout if the value of HM exceeds a given threshold and to “create” wall-cells in the unvisited areas. The process is iterative. A brief interpretation of the results has been presented.