One day before Bentley’s 2018 Year in Infrastructure Conference, we heard news that the company has acquired pedestrian simulation software provider Legion.
London-based Legion’s software models people's step-by-step journeys through public spaces, including movement and both person/person and person/environment interactions. The software allows building stakeholders to look at crowd management, flow maps, and emergency evacuation procedures. Now, Bentley has acquired Legion and integrated it into Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer (formerly known as AECOsim Building Designer), so that designers and architects can incorporate pedestrian movement when designing buildings, to solve congestion problems before they happen.
“Using LEGION and collaborative workflows with OpenBuildings Designer, our users can consider pedestrian simulations early on during conceptual design, during construction, during operation,” said Bhupinder Singh, chief product officer at Bentley.
The pedestrian flows are based on a combination of real-life data from closed-circuit TV cameras and sensors, and machine-learning programming used to extrapolate that data to other situations. Baseline data can be taken from one airport or stadium and used to understand others. "[LEGION] learns based on flows that it has from data and videos, and applies it to situations where there's no video," said Santanu Das, senior vice president of design engineering for Bentley. These flows are especially useful in large buildings like stadiums, airports, and subway stations, which have many people flowing through them in a very short amount of time.
And, while pedestrian software can be used to plan ahead for everyday crowding and congestion, perhaps LEGION’s most time-critical application is predicting how people will evacuate in an emergency. "In the past, pedestrian simulation was most often used to do flow efficiency,” Das said. “Now, it’s becoming more about safety.” According to Das, the program can be used to plan evacuations, and design buildings where those evacuations will be less risky.
“Natural disasters don’t kill people,” he concluded, “buildings kill people.” And while he admitted that the collection of pedestrian flow data is still an “evolving science,” he’s optimistic about LEGION’s potential to create a safer generation of buildings, better-able to weather both small-scale challenges and large-scale disasters.