Hello to everyone. I'm Giorgio Vasena. I'm a professor of Geomatics at the University of Brescia, North Italy. I'm going to present this paper, the indoor mobile mapping system and crowd simulation to support school reopening because of COVID-19, a case study.

I'm a part of a number of experts and researchers on different topics. Mainly I'm, as I said, involved in this paper because I'm involved in the part of 3D mapping and scan to beam and point cloud managing.

So I am part of this, so I will not be able to present at the best the other parts, but I do the best to make possible you understanding what we have done in this case study.

The pandemic emergency due to SARS-CoV-2 has made occupancy analysis a crucial topic of international research on building performance. The need to develop simulation to support the functional analysis of building spaces in relation to social distancing rules is an example.

This became even more fundamental considering the need to assess the sustainability of spaces in high occupancy buildings as the educational ones.

For which occupancy evaluations results are very important and crucial to ensure the safety of the end user in their daily activities. This paper is organized in a fast introduction in the motivation of the research and going in

the details of research methodologies applied and we are going to present nice results and some conclusions.

We can say that in architecture, engineering, construction and operation field, crowd simulation have progressively emerged as an approach to design, predict and assess occupancy of indoor spaces use, in particular for building typologies that implicate extensive navigation and pedestrian movement.

At the same time, a few crowd simulation applications have focused on educational facilities and in some times we have also some applications that have been developing some gains to help the students to apply this regulation in daily use of the spaces of the school.

There are not a lot of previous works on this kind of

epidemics and related risk assessment. More crowd simulation are applied in environmental analytics. In particular, we have some indoor agent-based simulation with thermal perception, comfort and responsive behaviors.

So I think this application on educational buildings is something particular that we enjoyed a lot to carry on and in particular we have been starting making this research on May 2020 after that Italy was open after the long and tragic lockdown.

We have been working to make possible a secure and safe reopening of this school on September 2020 and what has happened. So what we have done, the results were really applied by the director of the school to manage the reopening of the school we are speaking on.

We are located in Milan, North Italy. This is an old building and as you see in the façade, it is not

so easy to organize movements and reorganize the movements in the school because the school is organized in a very classical way. So a big entrance, a big hall inside and the rooms are organized in a classroom but of course the native application was not a school.

We have kids from 2-3 years so it is not so easy to explain to these kids how to move, of course. And we reach young guys of 10 years and of course it is not easy to manage people of 8, 9, 10 years because they are excited.

Of course they want to run, to play, so it is not easy to provide them the freedom to enjoy the school but at the same time to do it following the safety regulation.

These are the main topics we have been facing in this study. First of all we made a data collection of plant view, drawings, all the stuff that was present in the school and later we made a 3D mapping of all the school, enjoying all this information.

We were able to create a big model that was the real important base of the study and also we could share between all the people involved in the research and some people were not in Milan so

they couldn't visit the site and we organized how to share this information, the geometrical information between the team. The first application was to analyze how many people could stay in the room following the regulation of the Italian state

and of course how to organize the path and how to organize the desks inside the room, so desks and movements. All this was checked and analyzed with crowd simulation in the different timing of the use

of the school, different use of different spaces and we can show some nice interesting training videos. All this we tried to transfer the results that was later applied by the director using

a particular study of sign, how to communicate to small children the regulation they had to follow. So you need a sign with colors, everything must look like a game, like something that children can enjoy doing that.

Finally is a very important topic, we use all this information, the geometrical information, just to also make a very rigorous, innovative approach on ventilation, how to manage the ventilation in this old building.

Because it is well known that good ventilation helps to contain the transmission of the pandemic between people. So, the regulations of the Italian state are, I think, something very obvious,

let's say, but we have also some regulations that, let's say, have some conflicts. So, for example, we will see that, for example, the definition of how to manage the relative position between students in the schools was not really clear.

So, sometimes these regulations define the minimum distancing, sometimes they define the areas that every student has to cover, so it's not easy to define a good organization of the spaces if, at the beginning, for the emergency, the regulation was not so clear.

So, we started, first of all, with a very innovative approach. This is the first time we'll be using this device in the field, because you see, in fact, that the device I was using, this is myself, it was still, let's say, a demo unit.

This system has been developed by the Spinoff company of Iowa University in Brescia, and this system is based on SLAM technology, that means that the system can also acquire indoor environments without using GPS.

So, you can move inside the environments and create 3D maps. And you see here, the system is based on two LIDAR sensors. Every sensor has 16

rotating beams with a range of about 100 meters and an accuracy of 2.3 centimeters. Inside here, on the measuring head, there is a IMU, an Inertial System, and here is a full panoramic camera that can acquire 5K images on demand and full images, full resolution images, every 2-3 seconds with a frequency like this.

So, first of all, let's say, we don't go too much in the details of the system, and we see here what is the result you can get from the system.

And the result is very, so you have point clouds, and on the point clouds you can project your spherical images. So, you can move in the spherical images, looking around, take measurements, and in particular, what's very interesting, you can share this information everywhere in the web. So, without being here, all the researchers involved in the project could have the possibility to visit and to

see how was in reality the school, and so it was very helpful for the decision making to share information. This is, let's say, an important way to share data, but the second is a more technical one.

The point clouds that has been generated on the three floors of the buildings, I just remember that this mapping, for example, for the fourth floor of the building was acquired in less than 50 minutes, just working time. And the result was produced in, after, let's say, about 45, one hour time.

So, you have a resolution map, and this is a tool that presents a projection, an orthophoto of the point clouds, it's called x-ray or blueprint image, and we can see how it appears.

This is something that you can easily change with people, and you see here, you have a map, you have a room, you can see everything in the room. You can later check tables, you can check also how the space is organized, and you can

take measurements, you can make depth measurements on this, and later you can export this information to AutoCAD, and this scaled image can be moved in AutoCAD where you can redraw it, and you obtain a very nice DIVO G AutoCAD-based drawing, so a map of the drawing.

And from this, and from the point clouds, you can update with different approaches, using Revit, Autodesk, or Clear Edge softwares. So, standard softwares, you can create your BIM model. For example, this is the Revit base BIM model.

And from this is the base to produce deliverables, like the analysis of the capacity of every room, and the desk arrangement in the different rooms.

Due to the fact that, as I told you at the beginning, you have three, for example, these three official regulations that are all active, it was not an easy job to define which of these regulations, how to integrate and to mix these regulations at the same time. But there is an example that for every room, the analysis of two rooms, A and B, with different areas, applying

one over three regulations, you have a very difference in the number of teachers and students that can stay in one room. The plan, of course, was very, very useful to organize the use of the spaces and to integrate the existing room with new ones.

And this, for example, the information platform one, and this is one of the information platforms where the data has been organized with different use of different areas of the school. And this, for example, an evaluation with different algorithms and approaches of every room, how many

students and teachers can support, how many students can go in the seats in the room.

And very, very interesting was this approach. So all this data, the 3D data, the plan view can be used to create a crowd simulation, with the crowd simulation software, the movements of the people. So we tried to understand the end user's flows. So you see here is the entrance,

you see in the right here is some place where you have a possible crowded area. And we launched this for different situations, like the entrance, the exit entrance, the exit of the students from the rooms and the lunch time, because it's very critical the time where the people go to the canteen.

And this, for example, how the main hall was organized in different blocks, in a way to try to avoid any kind of interaction between people and students staying in different classrooms.

And so we tried to organize free time in the big room, trying to take the people of different rooms separated. And this is a nice example of the exit time, how the model tried to analyze the time the students are starting going out from the room, from the classroom.

Okay, for example, you see here all the people inside, and you see here, I cannot say this is done to create the path, but it's very useful to understand if there are some critical areas and how to organize.

And it's very useful to understand better how to organize these flow of students and people, for example, at the time of the exit from the structure, because you have people coming from the second level, going south here, you have to avoid that they mix with people of the zero level, for example.

And, for example, this is the results of the analysis of the access to the canteen area, where this is the canteen area, and in particular it was very hard to understand how to organize,

because the canteen space can manage only 59 people in this situation. And I think you can see how it can be very useful also for teaching and organizing the movements of the people inside the canteen.

And, for example, you see here, there can be some problem, a new classroom coming inside, and you see the teacher going there. And you see how has been used in this system just to support the direct decision-making process.

And here we have some examples of how the science has been organized in the way that a kid of four or five years can easily understand that he has to follow, for example, the green fits, because it becomes like a game, okay?

And so those organized the movements with this way, and it seems they're having very good success. And you see all the panels organized, which is cool, I mean, there is a project with all the panels, all the different layers of different panels, and all the panels, as you see here, are organized by the way that also a

kid can understand and try to enjoy to see this panel and to follow the regulation. And let's say last but not least is the ventilation analysis, okay? Having the 3D of all the structure, having the dimension of the doors and windows, we could run a very, very deep

and interesting analysis of all the dimensions of all the windows and about all the ventilation of every area of the school.

And this, it was done in a very advanced algorithm to analyze what is explained in the paper. And in this way, it could be possible to analyze not only how to organize the people in the room due to the numbers of people and distances, but also to the ventilation,

because with an old structure, and the good is the old structure has a very high ceiling, but okay, we wanted to be sure that the students could access to the area in a very safe way. So we are approaching to the end, what we can say, we can say that of course the crowd simulation has been very, very useful for what?

To check if some critical path and trajectories of people are present, but mainly is a decision-making support for the director, that of course, he's a real manager, a real master chef of this reopening.

And these all the tools that we have developing has been very useful for the decision-making process of the director of the school. The limits, the limits are that it's really not easy to transfer this regulation to students, in particular students that are very active, like people from 16 years old.

And I think it's really, we don't face the pedagogical aspect and teaching methods, but of course are very important to transfer this regulation, the results of this research to the kids. And future, future is we want to go on making and developing serious game to try to educate in a very light and easy way the students.

And I think we want to go on analyzing what's, how this path and crowding analysis can be applied and having good results or bad results in the school organization.

Thank you for attending and following me in this presentation and I hope to come back very soon in the future with new results on this topic. Thank you so much.