Agent‐based human behavior modeling for crowd simulation

Abstract

AbstractHuman crowd is a fascinating social phenomenon in nature. This paper presents our work on designing behavior model for virtual humans in a crowd simulation under normal‐life and emergency situations. Our model adopts an agent‐based approach and employs a layered framework to reflect the natural pattern of human‐like decision making process, which generally involves a person's awareness of the situation and consequent changes on the internal attributes. The social group and crowd‐related behaviors are modeled according to the findings and theories observed from social psychology (e.g., social attachment theory). By integrating our model into an agent execution process, each individual agent can response differently to the perceived environment and make realistic behavioral decisions based on various physiological, emotional, and social group attributes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, a case study has been conducted, which shows that realistic human behaviors can be generated at both individual and group level. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.