AVATARS
From EuroVR Knowledge Base
- Full name
- Advanced Virtual Agents for Testing the Accessibility of Rail Stations
- Acronym
- AVATARS
- Website
- Keywords
- Budget
- € 1.13 million euro
- Start date
- 2005/04/01
- End date
- 2007/09/30
Contents |
Partners
- FERROCARRILS DE LA GENERALITAT DE CATALUNYA
- AUTORITAT DEL TRANSPORT METROPOLITA
- BURO HAPPOLD LIMITED
- UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD
- UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH
Funding Bodies
- EU FP6
- SUSTDEV-2.1.1 New technologies and concepts for all surface transport modes (Road, Rail and Waterborne)
- STREP
Contact
- DOYLE, Rory (Dr)
- Tel: +44-20-89435544
- BRITISH MARITIME TECHNOLOGY LTD, BMT TRANSPORT SOLUTIONS GMBH, RESEARCH DIRECTORATE, Orlando House, 1 Waldegrave Road PO Box, UNITED KINGDOM
Objectives
Current rail transport infrastructure design is led by aesthetics and prescriptive regulations. This is a problem in passenger intensive operations, where performance and comfort are major issues. Better terminal design would provide increased passenger throughput and less overcrowding but it is very difficult to design for performance without accurate simulation tools. Existing tools are available to simulate passenger evacuation but none have been developed specifically for general circulation movements . AVATARS will develop a range of innovative technologies to allow the simulation of passenger movements in and around rail terminals in normal circulation behaviour. Tools will enable designers to populate structures with large groups of realistic, inte racting agents and follow their movements through a series of pre-defined, realistic scenarios. This technology will allow building and infrastructure design to be tested for passenger comfort and convenience at the design stage. In order to achieve this , AVATARS will develop five major software components. The first will look at agent interaction, specifically their interaction with each other and with their environment. The second component will allow the agents to respond emotionally to their environm ent. The third component will develop a tool to rapidly generate realistic test scenarios, in order to speed up and simplify simulation runs. The fourth tool will assist users in isolating the cause of any problem within the terminal design and, lastly, a tool will be developed to improve visualisation technologies for the simulation, through rendering developments and the use of new Virtual Reality techniques. The evaluation of the developments will be carried out under a series of case studies, develop ed throughout the project. These will take real-world information from operating terminals and trains and produce complex, multi-event scenarios capable of evaluating the abilities of the AVATARS software.
Main Results
End Users
Evaluation Methodologies
Fill with the evaluation methodologies. Evaluation methods already in the KB can be found in Category:Evaluation Methods
