Crowd behavior modeling and simulation

Abstract

As a collective and highly dynamic social group, human crowd is a fascinating phenomenon in nature. While well-organized crowd activities improve the public's enjoyment of events, uncontrolled crowd may cause accidents and event disasters in many cases. Numerous incidents with large crowd have been recorded in human history, and many of these incidents have led to severe casualties and injuries. How to predict and control the behavior of a crowd upon various events has become an intriguing and challenging issue faced by many psychologists, sociologists, and computer scientists. However, due to the inherent nature of the crowd events, it is difficult to study the crowd behaviors based on conventional empirical analysis. Recently, computer-based modeling and simulation technologies have emerged to support investigation of the dynamics of crowds. This research follows this trend and aims to develop a generic crowd behavior modelling framework, which models human-like cognitive processes involved in decision making and action selection. The designed framework aims to serve as a general framework for model developers to construct their behavior models for different scenarios.