Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Summer 2021
Learning Unity: Best Exit Design for Emergency Evacuation
Haiyue Sun
SCS Honours Project Image
ABSTRACT
Suppose you are enjoying a party or an event holding in a shopping mall. Suddenly, an unexpected situation happens such as a fire, an earthquake. Shopping mall requires an emergency evacuation. However, people tend to be "greedy", everyone want to escape as soon as possible. This will result a congestion at the exit which may limit the efficiency of the evacuation. In fact, there are research papers in architecture and praxeology talked about this question. The crowd congestion is caused by human behaviors. Those papers conclude that building a pillar-liked in front the exit can cause an evacuation time improvement, which takes even shorter time than the empty exit. It is opposite to the common sense. The goal of this project is to verify this conclusion by simulating in a visual program with some AI involved. Since I am planning to enter game industry, so I have decided to complete this project by using Unity Game Engine, which is a famous game engine can be used to create 3D and 2D games, as well as interactive simulation and other experiences. Programming language will be based on C#. Human behaviors in the simulation will be trained as an AI by using Unity ML-Agents. Keywords: Evacuation, Unity, Unity ML-Agents