=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1778/AmILP_6
|storemode=property
|title=SmartSim: Improving Visualization on Social Simulation for an Emergency Evacuation Scenario
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1778/AmILP_6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1778
|authors=Antonio M. Diaz,Ganggao Zhu,Álvaro Carrera,Carlos A. Iglesias,Oscar Araque
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ecai/DiazZCIA16
}}
==SmartSim: Improving Visualization on Social Simulation for an Emergency Evacuation Scenario==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1778/AmILP_6.pdf
SmartSim: Improving visualization on social simulation
for an emergency evacuation scenario
Antonio M. Diaz and Ganggao Zhu and Alvaro Carrera and Carlos A. Iglesias
and Oscar Araque 1
Abstract. planning. In both type of emergencies, effective emergency evacua-
The simulation of indoor evacuation is important for rescue and tion is a key component of emergency response. Emergency evacua-
safety management, while a better visualization of simulation could tion preparation activities are required to be developed in advance be-
help users to understand the evacuation plan better and to design the cause they ensure that people can get to safety in case of emergency.
evacuation activities more effectively. The purpose of this paper is However, the evacuation demonstration in case of emergency is not
to show an indoor evacuation simulator with more realistic graphi- always feasible because of ethical, practical and financial issues [8].
cal user interface for both interacting and visualizing the simulation In order to define effective evacuation plans, understanding disasters
of evacuation plans. The proposed evacuation simulator combines and crowd emergency evacuation behaviours [3] conveniently with
a social simulation framework UbikSim and a character animation low cost, the ABS can be used to simulate the crowd behaviour and
platform SmartBody. UbikSim is used as a back-end social simula- to analyze the effectiveness of evacuation plan. For instance, in a
tion engine for evacuation scene management and evacuation simu- evacuation simulator, the building is modeled and populated by dif-
lation calculation such as computing agent positions and evacuation ferent numbers of agents representing various types of persons (e.g.,
path. SmartBody is focused on various behaviours and capabilities of handicapped persons, etc.) and common emergence situations such
agents with digital 3D character in real time, which is used to visu- as blocked doors. Different agents behaviour according to predefined
alize the locomotion, emotion and facial expressions of agents with rules and the results of their actions are measured, hence the best of
more realistic animations in simulation. We develop a connector for evacuation model can be selected according to simulation, without
SmartBody to control and visualize the simulation by communicat- risking any real assets and situating human in dangerous situations.
ing with UbikSim. The proposed evacuation simulator is validated in UbikSim 2.0 [11] is such kind of agent-based social simulator to
a real world university evacuation scenario with multiple simulation recreate the human behaviour inside a building. Specifically, Ubik-
settings. Sim is used to model the map of the building where the emergency
simulation takes place. Then, it simulates the virtual users (agents)
under emergency and calculates the evacuation path for agents based
1 Introduction on various criteria such as least crowd or nearest exit. However,
Social simulation is a research field that applies computational meth- UbikSim has limited features of graphical user interface in control-
ods to study issues in the social sciences. In social simulation, com- ling and visualizing agents with abundant behaviours and various
puters aim to imitate human reasoning activities by executing pro- characters, where agents are represented as simple as equivalent fig-
cesses, mechanisms and behaviours that build the reality. This ap- ures in the map and there is no way to inspect visually the agents
proach enables to investigate some complex models that cannot be types (e.g. man or woman) or their emotions (e.g. fear or happiness).
investigated through mathematical models. Social simulation is con- In order to enhance the visualization of UbikSim framework, we
sidered as a third way of doing science, differing from both the propose to incorporate SmartBody [12] to provide visualization of
deductive and inductive approach [1], in which simulating a phe- agents in an animation approach. More specifically, the agents in the
nomenon is akin to constructing artificial societies. Agent-Based map are represented as human-like 3D animations. The movements
Simulation (ABS) is a kind of social simulation that represents a of agents can be demonstrated in a more realistic way and with more
simulation system as a society of agents that are designed to de- options such as walk, run or jump. Furthermore, agents are able to ex-
scribe the behaviour of observed social entities such as individuals or press emotions in their animated face and to response to events in an
groups [6]. Agent based social simulation is very useful to predict the interactive life-like manner such as speak with gestures and face ex-
behaviour of individual agents or crowds in complex environments, pressions. Moreover, the description of such behaviour is simplified
especially for simulating a dangerous environment and experiment- by using Behavior Markup Language (BML) [9] because SmartBody
ing the possible results of some actions based on simple rules. is also a BML realization engine that transforms BML behaviour de-
Various emergence cases can happen in a building such as fire, scriptions into real time animations. Consequently, the proposed sys-
earthquake, water leak, and gas leak, to name a few. Crowd evacua- tem can provide a complete graphic rendering platform to bring var-
tions, such as disasters at massive parties, sport events and terrorist ious characters with predefined movement animations and behaviour
attacks can also lead to tragedies when performed without careful sets together with a social simulation engine. In this way, we could
add many different type of agents by simply adding their behaviour
1 Intelligent Systems Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, descriptions through BML settings. In addition, the system is also
Spain, email: antoniom.diaz.dom@gmail.com, gzhu@dit.upm.es, designed to be easily extended for future development.
a.carrera@dit.upm.es, cif@dit.upm.es, oscar.aiborra@alumnos.upm.es
To summarize, we would like to show the main contributions of
this work:
• We propose and implement a novel agent-based evacuation simu-
lator, named SmartSim2 , that combines an agent-based social sim-
ulator UbikSim with a character animation platform SmartBody.
• The proposed evacuation simulator has been validated and demon-
strated in a realistic school building with different simulation sce-
narios.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we
present the background of this work. Section 3 gives the overview of
the proposed evacuation simulator and discusses the implementation
details. Finally, we describe the evaluation of the proposed simulator
in a school evacuation scenario with different settings in Section 4
and close the paper in Section 5 by showing the main conclusions of
this work and providing a possible view on future work.
2 Background Figure 1. Example of Ubiksim framework for Agent-based Simulation
This section introduces some background knowledge of required
components to develop the proposed evacuation simulator. We first
review the idea and functionality of agent-based social simulator 2.2 SmartBody and BML
UbikSim in Section 2.1. Then, we introduce the character animation SmartBody framework4 is an open source character animation plat-
platform SmartBody and the behaviour description language BML in form for animating Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) [12],
Section 2.2. which provides capabilities for digital 3D characters in real time such
as the animations of locomotion, steering, object manipulation, lip
2.1 Agent-based Social Simulator UbikSim syncing, gazing, non-verbal behaviour or re-targeting. SmartBody
contains its own viewer and 3D renderer so that it can be run as a
Agent-based social simulation [5] is good at predicting the behaviour
standalone system or incorporated into game or simulation engines.
of agents in complex environments. Ubiksim 2.0 [11] is an imple-
SmartBody is focused on proving various behaviours and interactive
mentation of an agent-based social simulator which has been de-
characters of artificial agents so we use it as graphical user interface
veloped by Universidad de Murcia and Universidad Politécnica de
of evacuation simulator, while UbikSim takes charge of scene man-
Madrid 3 . It is a framework that can be used to develop social simu-
agement and simulation computation. In addition, the life-like be-
lation which emphasizes the construction of realistic indoor environ-
haviour requires the synchronized movement of multiple parts of the
ments, the modeling of realistic human behaviours and the evaluation
agents simulated body. For example, to realize the gaze behaviour re-
of Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence systems. Ubik-
quires coordination of eye, head, neck movements. Moreover, to sup-
Sim is implemented in Java and employs a number of third-party li-
port coherent interpretation of behaviour, the animation of gestures,
braries such as SweetHome3D and MASON. It consists of a console
eye flashes and speech audio must be synchronized in time with each
used to launch the simulation as well as a map in 3D or 2D where the
other. SmartBody implements the behaviour realization engine that
position of all the agents involved in the simulation can be visualized.
transforms BML behaviour descriptions into real time animations.
Moreover, UbikSim tries to be a tool for using Multi-Agent Based
As a consequence, we are able to have various predefined animations
Simulation (MABS) [4] in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) [10] which
of agents with different types by describing their different behaviours
is a computerized environment that is sensitive to human and objects
with BML.
actions. MABS consists of modeling the environments with many
artificial agents in order to observe the behaviours of agents, while Listing 1. A BML Example
it is possible to learn about their reactions. In case of evacuation
simulation, effective activities can be derived from observing the be-
haviours of artificial agents and the outcomes of some simulated phe-
nomena in evacuation. These behaviours cannot be observed in non-
evacuation conditions. In contrast, other kinds of simulations model < t e x t>Welcome
the entire environment as mathematical models where the individu-
als are viewed as a structure that can be characterized by a number of
variables. Conventionally, it is not feasible to test a large number of
users in AmI, whereas UbikSim enables the simulation of social be-
haviours from large group of users by applying the MABS approach
to AmI environments. BML is an XML based description language for controlling the
As an example, Figure 1 illustrates a map used for evaluation verbal and non verbal behaviour of ECAs [2]. BML is used to de-
based on UbikSim, including a demostration of an agent-based sim- scribe the physical realization of behaviours (e.g. speech and gesture)
ulation. of the agents expressing them with movements that need to be real-
ized by an agent. Those movements are single elements (e.g. gaze,
2 SmartSim Repository: https://github.com/gsi-upm/SmartSim
3 Ubiksim Public Repository: https://github.com/emilioserra/UbikSim 4 SmartBody Web Site: http://smartbody.ict.usc.edu/
speech, head) and listed one after another, as exemplified in List- form the simulation and calculate the paths that agents have to fol-
ing 1. low in order to evacuate the building. It relies on UbikSim to perform
simulation computation and retrieves position data from UbikSim in
3 SmartSim Simulator real time. Within the map, and position data in run time, SmartBody
presents a realistic 3D evacuation environment and enables users to
The main goal of the proposed evacuation simulator is to use Ubik- control the simulation such as pausing or advancing.
Sim as social simulation engine and to use SmartBody as graphical UbikSim has many kinds of options, such as editing and creat-
interface of the simulator. This section presents the implementation ing artificial environment with an easy to use interface, configur-
details of the proposed simulator system in Section 3.1 and also of- ing various number of agents. The communication between UbikSim
fers an overview of the simulation gateway in Section 3.2. and SmartBody is based on Representational State Transfer (REST-
ful) [7] architecture through web requests.
3.1 Architecture Overview
The SmartSim simulator system consists of a social simulation mod- 3.2 Simulation Gateway Implementation
ule (UbikSim), a simulation gateway module and a graphical visual- The simulation gateway is composed by four different modules: sim-
ization module (SmartBody). The overview of the proposed system ulation configuration module, graphical visualization module, real
has been illustrated in Figure 2. The idea is to connect the social time communication module and simulation control module. The
simulation engine with the animation engine through the simulation simulation configuration module parses user defined configuration
gateway, in order to provide an integrated evacuation simulation sys- of simulation such as agent numbers, emergency scenarios, initial
tem. We rely on the existing simulation engine, while we develop positions and evacuation plans. Some relevant configuration options
the simulation gateway and incorporate the animation engine into a are illustrated in Table 1. Then, the configuration data are passed to
complete graphical user interface for controlling, managing and vi- UbikSim social simulator through web request API and to Smart-
sualizing the simulation. Body through its Python API. According to the configuration data,
The social simulation module is based on UbikSim and is used social simulator initializes the simulation, creating the agents and
for managing agents, describing the emergency scenario, modeling setting their positions. The scenario resources are loaded to set the
the indoor evacuation environment and creating evacuation plan. The mark for emergency such as emergency position. The character re-
graphical visualization module is based on SmartBody and is used sources such as skeleton and polygonal model are loaded for further
for visualizing the agent behaviour in life-like animation in simula- usage of SmartBody.
tion. To combine UbikSim and SmartBody, we implement a simula-
tion gateway that helps to manage the social simulation configuration Option Description
and to provide communication between UbikSim and SmartBody in amountAgents The number of agents in our simulation.
real time while running the simulation. Moreover, a user friendly amountLeaders The number of leaders in our simulation.
ubikSimServer The address of UbikSim server.
graphical user interface based on SmartBody has been implemented meshScenario The scenario file for simulation.
to utilized the simulation gateway so that end users can manage and modeSimulation The possible simulation modes.
visualize the simulation conveniently.
Table 1. Summary of SmartSim configuration options.
Based on configuration data, SmartBody creates the simulation
scene (e.g. maps and agents) and starts the graphical visualization
module that calls the graphic interface of SmartBody and a default
camera to display the simulation. Moreover, the configuration mod-
ule also loads the description resources for different character of
agents from BML description resources, so the different type of ani-
mation can be rendered in simulation.
Option Effect
output=web Displays the web graphic interface.
control=pause Executes the pause control.
control=play Executes the play control.
control=stop Executes the stop control.
control=frames Starts the displayers in the server side.
position=people Returns the agents positions.
position=map Returns the map coordinates and obstacles.
position=emergency Returns the emergency position and room.
position=(id,x,y) Adds the agent to the position.
Figure 2. General Architecture of SmartSim simulator
Table 2. Summary of UbikSim API actions.
In addition, UbikSim provides a scene editor that can pass the
environment map to SmartBody. As SmartBody is not able to per- The real time communication module retrieves agents’ positions
and paths from UbikSim and converts them into specific form of po-
sition and path for SmartBody. Consequently, the SmartBody can
present the animation of agents that execute the evacuation plan. The
UbikSim simulation run time Web API is illustrated in Table 2.
Furthermore, a simulation control module is implemented in
SmartBody to control the simulation and make agents follow their
path. It can be used to control every step of simulation and make
agents Pause, Advance, and Stop. The actions of those commands are
passed to UbikSim through the real-time communication module, so
the gateway is able to coordinate the simulation in real time between
UbikSim and SmartBody. After simulation finished, the simulation
control module will record the simulation results containing the time
that an agent spent to exit the building from its initial position and
more relevant data for further analysis.
4 Use case scenarios
The implemented evacuation simulator system has been validated
in a real use case scenario which is simulating evacuation activi-
ties. The indoor environment is selected as the building B of the
School of Telecommunication Engineers (ETSIT) of the Universi-
dad Politécnica de Madrid. A demonstration video of all the vali- Figure 3. The map model loaded in SmartBody GUI automatically
dation tasks can be found in YouTube5 . The implementation of the imported from UbikSim.
simulator as well as validation case studies are published and avail-
able in a public Github repository6 . We will first introduce how we
simulation result data are also generated by simulation gateway con-
create the validation map in Section 4.1 and then present three evac-
taining the exit time of each agent. We first validate the system in
uation scenarios. Section 4.2 illustrates a single agent scenario where
a scenario of evacuation of single agent from the building. Agent
an agent escapes, leaving the building from any initial position of the
will escape the building following the path given by UbikSim. We
building. Also, this section presents a more complicated case where
demonstrate the emergency and the character escaping the building.
multiple agents evacuate the building following a agent leader. Fi-
The configuration of simulation is set as single agent without any
nally, we present a more realistic social simulation that different type
character. The agent needs to exit the building from his initial posi-
of agents escape the building from different initial position and adopt
tion based on the predefined path. SmartBody is set up to show the
different evacuation path.
evacuation of agent with animations, while simulation gateway will
record the time the agent used to escape the building. This scenario
4.1 Map Creation is used to validate the system correctness.
The second scenario is the extension from the previous one by
The map of the building has been modeled in UbikSim and is il-
adding the number of agents and a simple evacuation model. The es-
lustrated in Figure 1. The generated map file has been exported to
caping in a crowd is a common phenomena in evacuation and is the
SmartBody in configuration. Note that any polygonal model gener-
main place that dangerous situation may appear. In the crowd simu-
ated with 3D modeling program such as Blender could fit the re-
lation, we design a number of agents and one of these agents become
quirement of SmartBody. UbikSim editor is based on SweetHome3D
the leader, while the other agents will follow the leader from their
which is a free indoor design application. We can draw the map of
initial point to the exit. This scenario helps to extend the previous
our scenario, arrange furniture on it and visualize the results in 3D.
scenario with consideration of multiple agents.
It is also easy to create a scenario as drawing the walls and rooms.
It is a common phenomena in evacuation plans some crowds are
Several objects libraries have been added and can be imported to
leaded by a leader. The setting is similar to the previous case, while
the editor, which can add completion and detail of our scenario. We
we also define the numbers of leaders and their following groups
implemented an extension in UbikSim, so the created scene can be
of agents. The non-leader agents will follow the path as their as-
exported to SmartBody automatically. Figure 3 shows the 3D school
signed leader. After simulation, the exit time of all the agents will
map in SmartBody GUI that have been passed from UbikSim, using
be recorded. Figure 4 shows the animation of crowd escaping with
the map shown in Figure 1.
leaders in SmartBody GUI. This scenario can help validate the per-
formance of simulator with multiple agents and validate the correct-
4.2 Single Agent Escaping ness of evacuation plan execution.
As mentioned previously, the simulation of agents is based on Ubik-
Sim, while SmartBody retrieves the paths and positions from it. By 4.3 Social Simulation with Characters and
configuring scene in the UbikSim editor, we set the positions and Emotions
numbers of agents, scenarios and location of the emergency. All these
Finally, we set a more realistic simulation scenario, where multiple
data is passed to SmartBody via the simulation gateway. UbikSim
agents with different type of characters escaping the building from
also retrieves the initial configuration from simulation gateway. The
different initial position following different paths. Figure 5 shows the
5 SmartSim Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kGKD8Ofxuw screenshot of animation of agents starting from different location and
6 SmartSim Repository: https://github.com/gsi-upm/SmartSim
execute different evacuation plans. It has been shown in Figure 5 that
Figure 4. The Crowd Escaping Figure 5. The agents escaping from different places
the simulator is able to present the social simulation of emergency
evacuation correctly. Moreover, the visualization of the simulation
become more realistic because there more kind of agents with differ-
ent emotions. The previous scenario has leader and follower charac-
ters, while the agents can have different gender or ages. For example,
Figure 6 illustrates a female agent named Rachel which is different
from the previous male agents. The SmartBody and BML enable the
animation of agents in a life-like way. By defining the behaviours in
BML files, agents can have different motions and face expression to
represent more human-like behaviours. For example, Figure 7 illus-
trates the agent expressing his happiness. This is achieved by con-
figuring the face element in BML and realized by SmartBody. We
believe that enabling the agents to express their feelings in face such
as fear in facing an emergency and happiness after evacuation can
make the visualization of simulation more realistic and help to make
the evacuation plans better.
5 Conclusions and Future Works
This paper presents an agent-based simulation system, named Smart-
Sim, for evacuations based on Ubiksim, where the graphical interface
has been enhanced with realistic animations and emotions in agents
using SmartBody. Figure 6. A ’Rachel’ type character
The interaction between UbikSim and SmartBody, which allowed
end-users to interact with simulation systems conveniently and vi-
sualize the simulation more powerfully, is implemented in different
modules written in Python. The system is designed as modular com-
ponents that can ease the future implementation of various simula- Several research lines that can be considered as following work to
tion purposes. The system has provided facilities for creating simu- continue and extend the features of this work. Firstly, a graphical in-
lation scenarios easily based on simple configuration file and those terface for scene control might be useful to help users in avoiding
scenarios can be exported to UbikSim and SmartBody automatically. mistakes in defining agent commands. Secondly, although Smart-
The visualization of simulation is achieved by very detailed artifi- Body offers very good performance of visualizing agent’s anima-
cial agents in animations. Furthermore, agents are able to express tions, it can be integrated with a graphical engine such as Unity
emotions and various behaviours which make our simulator more re- to improve the quality of animation. Finally, apart from the current
alistic. End users are allowed to select the numbers of agents as well desktop version, we are planning to implement a mobile version or
as their types with particular animation and behaviours. web-base version.
’08, pp. 151–158, Richland, SC, (2008). International Foundation for
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
Figure 7. An agent expressing happiness
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and
Competitiveness under the R&D projects SEMOLA (TEC2015-
68284-R) and MOSI-AGIL-CM (grant P2013/ICE-3019, co-funded
by EU Structural Funds FSE and FEDER).
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