TY - JOUR
T1 - Simulation-as-a-Service
T2 - Analyzing Crowd Movements in Virtual Environments
AU - Usman, Muhammad
AU - Haworth, Brandon
AU - Faloutsos, Petros
AU - Kapadia, Mubbasir
N1 - Funding Information: Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Urban Mobility (ISSUM), National Science Foundation (US), IIS‐1703883; S&AS‐1723869; Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) Funding information Funding Information: This research has been partially funded by grants from the ISSUM, OGS, and in part by NSF IIS‐1703883 and NSF S&AS‐1723869. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
PY - 2021/11/1
Y1 - 2021/11/1
N2 - At present, environment designers mostly use their intuition and experience to predictively account for how environments might support dynamic activity. The majority of Computer-Aided Design tools only provide a static representation of space which potentially ignores the impact that an environment layout produces on its occupants and their movements. To address this, computational techniques such as crowd simulation have been developed. With few exceptions, crowd simulation frameworks are often decoupled from environment modeling tools. They usually require specific hardware/software infrastructures and expertise to be used, hindering the designers' abilities to seamlessly simulate, analyze, and incorporate movement-centric dynamics into their design workflows. To bridge this disconnect, we devise a cross-browser service-based simulation analytics platform to analyze environment layouts with respect to occupancy and activity. Our platform allows users to access simulation services by uploading three-dimensional environment models in numerous common formats, devise targeted simulation scenarios, run simulations, and instantly generate crowd-based analytics for their designs. We conducted a case study to showcase cross-domain applicability of our service-based platform, and a user study to evaluate the usability of this approach.
AB - At present, environment designers mostly use their intuition and experience to predictively account for how environments might support dynamic activity. The majority of Computer-Aided Design tools only provide a static representation of space which potentially ignores the impact that an environment layout produces on its occupants and their movements. To address this, computational techniques such as crowd simulation have been developed. With few exceptions, crowd simulation frameworks are often decoupled from environment modeling tools. They usually require specific hardware/software infrastructures and expertise to be used, hindering the designers' abilities to seamlessly simulate, analyze, and incorporate movement-centric dynamics into their design workflows. To bridge this disconnect, we devise a cross-browser service-based simulation analytics platform to analyze environment layouts with respect to occupancy and activity. Our platform allows users to access simulation services by uploading three-dimensional environment models in numerous common formats, devise targeted simulation scenarios, run simulations, and instantly generate crowd-based analytics for their designs. We conducted a case study to showcase cross-domain applicability of our service-based platform, and a user study to evaluate the usability of this approach.
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U2 - https://doi.org/10.1002/cav.1990
DO - https://doi.org/10.1002/cav.1990
M3 - Article
SN - 1546-4261
VL - 32
JO - Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds
JF - Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds
IS - 6
M1 - e1990
ER -