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SOFTWAREfocus Motion control Oasys has added social distancing to the capabilities of the agents of its pedestrian simulation application MassMotion, making it much easier for organisations to conduct proximity analyses The social habits of a lifetime are disintegrating as we learn how to weather and survive the coronavirus pandemic. As it appears that the Covid-19 virus is mainly contracted by aerosol transmission from the mouth, the natural means of mitigating its effect is through face masks and social distancing. Face masks have long been seen as acceptable in many Asian countries, but in the west there are problems of acceptable freedoms and embarrassment to overcome. Allied with a measure of social distancing, though, where both practices have been carried out, the severity of the pandemic has declined. In contrast, exemplified by the overcrowded conditions of the garment factories in Leicester and the lack of personal protection for the workers, the pandemic has run rife. We may be inching towards the end of this outbreak but are fearful of another wave succeeding the first. Lessons being learned need to be acted on now and for the future, and companies wishing to provide greater safety for their staff, or organisations which see substantial footfall through their premises, need a tool that allows them to plan office layouts for a general return to work, or to maximise the throughput of their premises with effective pedestrian corridors. Oasys MassMotion has been used by many organisations to help the design and layout of pedestrian intensive buildings, stations and venues, using intelligent 'agents' that can respond in real-time to building layouts and the actions of other agents, so it was perhaps inevitable that Oasys would also turn their attention to a further constraint - namely the imposition of social distancing. The UK Government is urging people to return to working in offices - although many of us, having had to work from home, have now discovered its benefits, in that you can still be productive without the hassle of long and expensive commutes into the city. This actually assists large city-based offices in accommodating fewer staff more safely, and allows transport companies to encourage smaller numbers of expected passengers to use socially distanced channels. It also helps them to plan to ramp up to higher occupancy and throughput as the general populations natural fears decline. OASYS MASSMOTION Oasys MassMotion uses the BIM capabilities of a 3D building model - for example of an airport, station, stadium as or office block - to simulate the throughput of pedestrians during any type of scenario, from boarding a train to escaping from a hazardous event. Individual pedestrian agents, which are given tasks to perform such as moving from entrance A to Exit B, are programmed to recognise the behaviour of other agents and respond to the possible actions of those whose path will interact with theirs. Now that we are all being asked to accommodate new or future social distancing rules, Oasys MassMotion provides organisations with a highly focused set of tools that can produce detailed comparisons of different office schemes or pedestrian guidelines. Architects who are already using the software will be delighted to discover that they can use it to comply with both capacity rules and the government's safety guidelines. 12 July/August 2020
SOFTWAREfocus Social distancing proximity analysis in Oasys MassMotion from an operational or an economic perspective to open. "We have current customers and clients using MassMotion to test those return to work strategies," Miles explained further. "It's a way to test the possible futures and find possible interventions. It is also, in this current world, a way of testing whether, if the only way that we can meet the scientific advice means that we have to operate our particular facility at 10% of the population, it is worth being open. It might be that it would be better to wait until the guidance has changed in two, three weeks. You can test what that looks like, very quickly." THE RESPONSE TO COVID-19 Ensuring that staff remain safe on their return to work depends on physical functions rather than trying to outwit the virus. "We are not epidemiologists," explains Lachlan Miles, MassMotion Product Director at Oasys, "So we can't model the transmission of the virus. It is best to leave that to health authorities, scientists, and those whose speciality it is. But when things started to transition in different parts of the world into planning for a new normal, and what that might look like with physical distancing, we realised that MassMotion had a part to play. "What the team has done is to produce a new set of analytics that can be drawn from the software. We have also accelerated some experimental research to give customers the ability to test personal space preferences. For example, trying to maintain a two-metre distance." Distance is not the only aspect of the new normal to consider, as more prolonged exposure to virus characteristics in circumstances where the two-meter rule cannot be adequately enforced, appears to lead to a higher degree of infection. "We can pull reports showing how many people spend time within two meters of each other and how long that occurs for. We can also pull visual outputs, so agents within two meters of each other change colour, with maps summarising hotspots. Then, by making some interventions and rerunning the model, I can very quickly see I've reduced the time that people spend within two meters." Returning to normality (if one can consider that being at all remotely possible) also includes the return of social events, held at venues such as sports arenas and theatres. Oasys MassMotion provides organisers with the ability to mitigate the latent possibilities of Covid-19 transmission - latent because a fine line has to be drawn between when its safe to run attended events once more, and mitigating against the dangers of doing so, calculating the risk between keeping people safe and earning a living. "We have run some interesting little tests," says Miles. "We space out the queue at a venue with two metres between each guest, and reduce the number of staff in the area. While the amount of time that people are within close proximity to another human goes down by X per cent, the average time spent queuing might go from a couple of minutes to 15 minutes." MassMotion agents contravening the guidelines set up are visualised in the highly illustrative animated visualisations in red, whilst those complying with the measures are shown in blue. Venue owners and operators need to be sufficiently well informed to be able to make these trade-offs: to decide whether, with the controls that would have to be put in place, is it feasible HELPING TO MEET GUIDELINES In light of the current global situation, Oasys MassMotion takes the guesswork out of charting a pathway. It offers a way of showing how facility owners and operators are preparing to meet guidelines and directives, and ensures that the decisions made are informed ones. "I think it's important to get across that this is not a case of three software developers in a garage who have come up with something to respond to the Covid-19 issue," says Miles. "This is based on decades of research. The software has been around commercially for 10 years and major consulting firms have been using it for longer than that. We have had to work quite hard to make changes to pull out different analytics, but we feel that if there is something that we can do to help in this current climate, then we will." Oasys MassMotion is not a solution put together in haste to profit from the crisis. It is a sophisticated tool that has gone through a lengthy process of research and development. And it has been adapted to make it uniquely useful at this moment for owners and operators. Existing customers can use the extra capabilities of MassMotion at no extra cost, extending the core software and adding a tool to make it easier to do those proximity analyses for existing projects. www.oasys-software.com Jult/August 2020 13
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