Weekly Websights Simulation by Stephen Cass Simulation is among the earliest application that people found for computers. Of course, care must be taking that the computer's ability to create worlds to order does not led a complete seperation from reality. This week we bring you a collection of sites aimed at helping people capture something of the real world in silicon. Clearly, there would be ethical problems involving in examining the dynamics of people fleeing disaster in actual experiments.
Simulations are vital for planning the location of emergency exits and the size of stairwells.
Traditionally, crowd flow modelling has treated groups of people more as they were part of a fluid rather than individuals. Hungarian and German researchers have recently published a more sophisticated analysis of panic in crowds. On their web site are copies of their research in various formats and java simulations of crowds in various siutations and under different assumptions. One simulation demonstrates how a crowd which could exit a room in a timely fashion under normal conditions are panicked by an approaching fire front, resulting in casulties. The Swarm development group aims to create enabling software to simplify the creation of this type of simultation.