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Go with the Flow

Editorial Type: Review     Date: 01-2015    Views: 5429      







Oasys' pedestrian modelling software, MassMotion Flow, is now available for simulating movement in smaller and more dedicated projects.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the analysis of the flow of people through a building required a specialist application and the input from professionals who specialise in that area. Certainly, the case studies tend to focus on the mostly on large scale users of these applications, including a recent case study in this magazine on the redevelopment of Toronto's Union Square Station, which utilised MassMotion, a crowd analysis application developed by Oasys, Arup's software division. In fact Arup won the best use of IT in an Infrastructure Project 2014 for their Union Station work at the Construction Computing Awards in November.

However there are many other, smaller projects that could usefully employ traffic analysis to hone their designs. Designers of sports stadiums need to understand the rate at which they could be emptied at the end of a game; hospitals and other public buildings need to plan for rapid evacuation in the event of an emergency; and even cruise ships need to plan for pedestrians! It's an obvious use for such an application when you think about it, as the latest cruise ships are like small, crowded and enclosed towns, with some serious access issues.

Recognising the wider appeal of the software, Oasys has now introduced a scaled down version of MassMotion, MassMotion Flow, which is suitable for use by architects and fire engineers on smaller projects. It enables them to analyse specific pedestrian flow situations, and to subsequently modify their designs to provide better space optimisation and improved access.

MassMotion Flow is based on exactly the same analytical engine as the full version of MassMotion, with all of the real-time 3D visualisations and reporting capabilities in place. It does have limited capability to analyse complex events - such as the arrival and departure of trains at a mainline station, or security at an airport - and allows architects to single out specific events and to analyse human traffic flow around them. It also lacks the ability to create Agent Actions for the thousands of human 'agents' that populate a typical MassMotion model.

MASSMOTION
What, you may ask, are Agent Actions? Rather than having agents sticking to a predefined route through a 3D model, each is endowed with a task and sufficient intelligence to enable it to make simple choices - for instance if an elevator is busy, to head for the stairs instead. In fact the software looks at all of the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour, and as they pass through defined locations on their route - check-in desks, ticket barriers, baggage carousels - they can be issued with a 'token' that redirects them straight to the departure lounge or platform, or towards a café, a retail outfit or the loo!

The creation of security gates and agent tokens demands considerably more time and processing capability, time which an architect would wish to devote to more simple movement analysis tasks, and they will find more than sufficient functionality in MassMotion Flow.

Vision maps are another useful reporting function available in MassMotion, tracking track where agents look (cumulative eyeball time!) whilst they are proceeding through a concourse. The software assesses the information and presents it within a colour-coded 3D model to show the best positions to place adverts and other signage.

MassMotion Flow can obviously be used for space planning, which determines the flow of traffic and, surprisingly enough, it can use agents whose tasks have previously been created within MassMotion, as both levels of the software use the same simulation engine. This would enable architects to extract portions of the main model and run them for specific situations - a collaborative function that fulfils the software's BIM credentials. To be more specific, MassMotion models can already be used in MassMotion Flow, and the reverse will be available by the end of the year.

MASSMOTION FLOW
Rather than being used to calculate complex interactions within an airport, then, MassMotion Flow is more directly concerned with space planning. For instance, it analyses flow rates through a given area, say from the time that passengers step off a train or a plane to when they reach the station exit, or evaluates whether the capacity of a stadium section and its doors comply with the Green Book (the guide to safety at sports grounds).

MassMotion, by comparison, would link train or flight timetables to its analysis, and simulate all actions from passengers switching trains, exiting, buying tickets, being processed by security, or just standing about on the concourse.



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