Simulating crowd behaviour combining both microscopic and macroscopic rules

Abstract

We propose a new method for simulating pedestrian crowd movement in a virtual environment. A crowd consists of groups of different number of people with different attributes such as gender, age, position, velocity, and energy. Each group has its own intention used to generate a trajectory for each pedestrian navigating in the virtual environment. Additionally, an agent-based model is introduced to simulate pedestrian behaviours in the groups, where various steering behaviours are introduced and combined into a single steering force to allow pedestrians in each group to walk toward their destination point. Based on the proposed method, every single pedestrian in each group can continuously adjust their attributes. Moreover, pedestrians optimize their path independently toward the desired goals, while avoiding obstacles and other pedestrians in the scene. This method takes into account the safety-space around each pedestrian to avoid collisions among pedestrians. The proposed method was implemented for several simulation scenarios under various conditions for a wide range of different parameters. Statistical analysis is carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method for simulating the crowd movement in the virtual environment. Results indicate that our method can generate each pedestrian’s trajectories in each group independently to reach several goal points within a reasonable computational time. Moreover, the obtained results reveal that the mean value of the computational time is not increased significantly with the increasing of the number of pedestrians in the crowd.