When GIS meets pedestrian simulation

What happens when geographic intelligence meets human movement simulation? You get a living, breathing model of your city: a digital twin where people, places, and data come together to reveal how the world really works.

A digital twin with pedestrian simulation combines geospatial data with realistic models of crowd behavior. It allows planners, designers, and emergency services to test scenarios such as:

• How do people move during peak hours or large events?
• What happens when a road closes or a new transit hub opens?
• How can we improve safety, comfort, and accessibility in public spaces?

By embedding crowd dynamics directly into GIS environments, we can move beyond static maps, towards a continuously updating model that shows how spaces are used and how people interact with them.

Our workflow in action

Using SimCrowds, our large-scale pedestrian simulator, we:

• Import walkable areas and 3D urban environments from GIS data.
• Simulate crowd flows and densities in real time.
• Stream results back into GIS dashboards and visualizations for analysis.

This workflow connects the power of spatial data with the realism of human behavior, which is ideal for urban planning, event management, and safety design.

Integration with Esri’s ArcGIS ecosystem

In collaboration with Esri, we’ve integrated this simulation workflow directly into the Esri/arcgis environment.

Now you can:

• Run SimCrowds.
• Stream simulation outputs live into ArcGIS.
• Visualize and analyze results in 2D maps and the 3D Scene Viewer.

This unique combination, SimCrowds + ArcGIS, turns your GIS datasets into living laboratories for decision-making, empowering planners and analysts to explore “what if” scenarios instantly.

This demo was made possible with the support of Gert van Maren, the City of Vancouver and Fieldlab events Nijmegen (with Niels van der Vaart, Thomas Lier and many others); many thanks for your collaboration!

Want to bring your maps to life with moving people?

Contact us via info@ucrowds.com to learn more about integrating crowd simulation into your digital twin projects, or to discuss how we can help you model and visualize complex crowd dynamics.

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