Crowd simulation for crisis management: the outcomes of the last decade

TL;DR

This paper reviews the last decade of crowd simulation research for crisis management, highlighting technological advances, categorizing approaches, and proposing a framework for more realistic future simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a new categorization of crowd simulation research for crisis management and presents a comprehensive analysis of recent technological and methodological developments.

Findings

Multi-agent systems are prominently used in recent research.

The proposed framework aims to improve simulation realism and effectiveness.

Identifies key challenges and future directions in crowd simulation for crises.

Abstract

The last few decades, crowd simulation for crisis management is highlighted as an important topic of interest for many scientific fields. As the continues evolution of computational resources increases, along with the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence, the demand for better and more realistic simulation has become more attractive and popular to scientists. Along those years, there have been published hundreds of research articles and have been created numerous different systems that aim to simulate crowd behaviors, crisis cases and emergency evacuation scenarios. For better outcomes, recent research has focused on the separation of the problem of crisis management, to multiple research sub-fields (categories), such as the navigation of the simulated pedestrians, their psychology, the group dynamics etc. There have been extended research works suggesting new methods and techniques for those categories of problems. In this paper, we propose three main research categories, each one consist of several sub-categories, relying on crowd simulation for crisis management aspects and we present the outcomes of the last decade, focusing mostly on works exploiting multi-agent technologies. We analyze a number of technologies, methodologies, techniques, tools and systems introduced throughout the last years. A comparative review and discussion of the proposed categories is presented towards the identification of the most efficient aspects of the proposed categories. A general framework, towards the future crowd simulation for crisis management is presented based on the most efficient to yield the most realistic outcomes of the last decades. The paper is concluded with some highlights and open questions for future directions.