Using Cellular Automata Pedestrian Flow Statistics with Heuristic Search to Automatically Design Spatial Layout

摘要

The spatial layout of public space has an enormous impact upon the ease with which people can move. For example, a well designed public building such as a train station or hospital should allow for the smooth flow of a large number of people. In extreme cases, design can be so poor that during emergency evacuations people have been crushed to death. It is vital that design takes into account the smooth flow of pedestrians. In this paper we make an initial exploration in using pedestrian flow combined with heuristic search to assist in the automatic design for spatial layout planning. Using pedestrian simulations, the activity of crowds can be used to study the consequences of different spatial layouts. In this paper, a two-way pedestrian flow system is simulated and heuristic search techniques (hill climbing and simulated annealing) are used to find feasible spatial layouts based upon the generated statistics with promising results.