Analyzing egress accuracy through the study of virtual and real crowds

A variety of scientific models and computational tools have been developed to improve human safety and comfort in built environments. In this work we discuss the use of crowd simulation to reproduce and to evaluate egress performance in specific scenarios. We present CrowdSim, a crowd simulation tool designed to automatically reproduce crowd behaviors during building egress. Associated with this kind of software, that aims to be used in real life events, are critical validation questions. Here we present quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate our CrowdSim software, but that can be extended to any crowd simulator. To ground these methods a case study in a real night club evacuation was performed and results are discussed in the paper.