Citation

Sadeghi Lahijani M, Islam T, Srinivasan A, Namilae S. PLoS One 2020; 15(3): e0229690.

Affiliation

Aerospace Engineering Department, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida, United States of America.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0229690

PMID

32134966

Abstract

Pedestrian dynamics models the walking movement of individuals in a crowd. It has recently been used in the analysis of procedures to reduce the risk of disease spread in airplanes, relying on the SPED model. This is a social force model inspired by molecular dynamics; pedestrians are treated as point particles, and their trajectories are determined in a simulation. A parameter sweep is performed to address uncertainties in human behavior, which requires a large number of simulations. The SPED model's slow speed is a bottleneck to performing a large parameter sweep. This is a severe impediment to delivering real-time results, which are often required in the course of decision meetings, especially during emergencies. We propose a new model, called CALM, to remove this limitation. It is designed to simulate a crowd's movement in constrained linear passageways, such as inside an aircraft. We show that CALM yields realistic results while improving performance by two orders of magnitude over the SPED model.

Language: en