Abstract
This chapter presents Crowd-Z (CZ): a user-friendly framework for crowd simulations (CS) in any floor-plans. The crowd dynamics component of CZ is a straightforward agent-based model. Such CSs can be carried out at every stage of architectural or urban design process: from early sketches to the final blue-prints. Most importantly, CZ accepts the initial input in practically any form, e.g.: pre-processed drawings produced by Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software, digital images, free-hand drawings, etc. Selected methods of acquisition of the CS environment are demonstrated and illustrative with practical examples. Finally CZ is evaluated against commercially available software and with some “classic” CS experiments.