
IEEE MASS2024
D3 Student Tanaka Presents Research at IEEE MASS 2024 Conference

International Conference · 2024
This paper proposes a method to swiftly develop crowd control policies that enhance the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic. The method employs a novel, gradient-based black-box optimization technique, which uses a neural network to create a surrogate model replicating a multi-agent simulator. This approach facilitates the rapid generation of improved policies by leveraging gradient information, thereby significantly decreasing the time required to determine optimal strategies. By treating the simulator and its evaluation function as differentiable entities, the method allows for quick policy adjustments guided by gradient information. The proposed method quickly and accurately obtains policy parameters, adapting seamlessly to different optimization strategies in various scenarios. Our methodology was tested by applying it to actual pedestrian flow data from Koshien Stadium in Hyogo, Japan. The real-world application not only confirmed the practical utility of our optimization technique in effectively managing crowd scenarios but also marked a significant advancement in public safety measures for densely populated areas.
Sports events, concerts, and live performances attract large crowds, and the congestion during the return home after such events increases the risk of accidents, obstruction of emergency evacuations, and crime, posing a threat to public safety.
Therefore, appropriate crowd management, traffic planning, and security enhancements are required.
In particular, congestion mitigation through behavioral changes, such as phased departures and circulation promotion, has gained attention.
However, predicting the effectiveness and cost efficiency of such policies is challenging, and large-scale simulations require significant time, making traditional methods inefficient for optimal policy exploration.
To address this issue, this study constructs a surrogate model of a multi-agent simulation using neural networks and utilizes the gradient information of this model to efficiently search for optimal policies, enabling the rapid derivation of effective policies.

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