Crowd-Z: The user-friendly framework for crowd simulation on an architectural floor plan

This paper introduces Crowd-Z (CZ): a framework that provides a user-friendly platform where architects can perform simple crowd simulations on floor plans. A simple but robust and flexible agent-based system is used for modeling of the crowd dynamics. Such simulations can be performed at any stage of design - from rough sketches to the final blueprints. CZ allows acquiring the layouts for the simulations in a number of ways: freehand sketches, importing already prepared images and appropriating preprocessed images from commercially available Computer Aided Design programs. These three methods are illustrated with practical examples, followed by a number of simulations compared with the literature or other commercially available programs.