Title
Practical simulation of virtual crowds using points of interest.
Abstract
We present a computational method that exploits points of interest (POIs) to generate realistic virtual pedestrians for a city model, i.e., a simulated crowd. Our method is validated using mobility traces collected longitudinally from a city-wide free and open Wi-Fi network in downtown Oulu, Finland. Analysing this data, we first construct a time-varying Origin–Destination matrix that describes how individual pedestrians in our city move at different times and places. We compare this ground-truth against a random pedestrian model to investigate how the latter underestimates or overestimates movement at various locations or times of day. By identifying these deviations, we can calibrate a weighted model that uses POIs from OpenStreetMap to adjust the simulated crowd. Our results show a significant accuracy improvement over the random model, while at the same time our work is readily applicable to simulating crowds in other cities (real and virtual) as long as POI can be defined spatially.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2016.02.004
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Smart cities,Virtual environments,Pedestrian modelling
Data mining,Crowds,Pedestrian,Simulation,Downtown,Exploit,Point of interest,Geography
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
57
0198-9715
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
13
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matti Pouke1347.84
Goncalves, J.240442.24
Denzil Ferreira376849.89
Vassilis Kostakos41718138.50