SmartSim: Improving Visualization on Social Simulation for an Emergency Evacuation Scenario

The simulation of indoor evacuation is important for rescue and safety management, while a better visualization of simulation could help users to understand the evacuation plan better and to design the evacuation activities more effectively. The purpose of this paper is to show an indoor evacuation simulator with more realistic graphical user interface for both interacting and visualizing the simulation of evacuation plans. The proposed evacuation simulator combines a social simulation framework UbikSim and a character animation platform SmartBody. UbikSim is used as a back-end social simulation engine for evacuation scene management and evacuation simulation calculation such as computing agent positions and evacuation path. SmartBody is focused on various behaviours and capabilities of agents with digital 3D character in real time, which is used to visualize the locomotion, emotion and facial expressions of agents with more realistic animations in simulation. We develop a connector for SmartBody to control and visualize the simulation by communicating with UbikSim. The proposed evacuation simulator is validated in a real world university evacuation scenario with multiple simulation settings.