  The simulation of the dynamical behavior of pedestrians and crowds in spatial
structures is a consolidated research and application context that still
presents challenges for researchers in different fields and disciplines.
Despite currently available commercial systems for this kind of simulation are
growingly employed by designers and planners for the evaluation of alternative
solutions, this class of systems is generally not integrated with existing
monitoring and control infrastructures, usually employed by crowd managers and
field operators for security reasons. This paper introduces the essentials and
the related computational frame- work of an Integrated Crowd Management Support
System based on a Collective Artificial Intelligence approach encompassing (i)
interfaces from and to monitored and controlled environments (respectively,
sen- sors and actuators), (ii) a set of software tools supporting the analysis
of pedestrians and crowd phenomena taking place in the environment to feed a
(iii) faster than real-time simulation of the plausible evolution of the
current situation in order to support forms of inference provid- ing decision
support to crowd managers, potentially directly controlling elements of the
environment (e.g. blocking turnstiles, escalators), com- municating orders to
operators on the field or trying to influence the pedestrians by means of
dynamic signage or audible messages.
