Runtime Optimization of Force Based Models within the Hermes Project

The aim of the Hermes project is the development of an evacuation assistant to support security services in case of emergency in complex buildings and thus to improve safety at mass events. One goal of the project is to build models for pedestrian dynamics specifically designed for forecasting the emergency egress of large crowds faster than real-time using methods applied in high performance computing. We give an overview of the project and the modeling approaches used focusing on the runtime optimization and parallelization concepts.