Evaluation and Comparison of Multi-agent Based Crowd Simulation Systems

We present a novel automated technique for the quantitative validation and comparison of multi-agent based crowd egress simulation systems. Despite much progress in the simulation technology itself, little attention has been accorded to the problem of validating these systems against reality. Previous approaches focused on local (spatial or temporal) crowd patterns, and either resorted to visual comparison (e.g., U-shaped crowd at bottlenecks), or relied on ad-hoc applications of measures such as egress rates, densities, etc. to compare with reality. To the best of our knowledge, we offer the first systematic and unified approach to validate the global performance of a multi-agent based crowd egress simulation system. We employ this technique to evaluate a multi-agent based crowd egress simulation system that we have also recently developed, and compare two different simulation technologies in this system.