Modeling crowds has many important applications in games and computer animation. Inspired by the emergent following effect in real-life crowd scenarios, in this work, we develop a method for implicitly grouping moving agents. We achieve this by analyzing local information around each agent and rotating its preferred velocity accordingly. Each agent could automatically form an implicit group with its neighboring agents that have similar directions. In contrast to an explicit group, there are no strict boundaries for an implicit group. If an agent's direction deviates from its group as a result of positional changes, it will autonomously exit the group or join another implicitly formed neighboring group. This implicit grouping is autonomously emergent among agents rather than deliberately controlled by the algorithm. The proposed method is compared with many crowd simulation models, and the experimental results indicate that our approach achieves the lowest congestion levels in some classic scenarios. In addition, we demonstrate that adjusting the preferred velocity of agents can actually reduce the dissimilarity between their actual velocity and the original preferred velocity. Our work is available online.

Modeling and simulation approaches that express crowd movement with mathematical models are widely and actively studied to understand crowd movement and resolve crowd accidents. Existing literature on crowd modeling focuses on only the decision-making of walking behavior. However, the decision-making of route choice, which is a higher-level decision, should also be modeled for constructing more practical simulations. Furthermore, the reproducibility evaluation of the crowd simulation incorporating the route choice model using real data is insufficient. Therefore, we generalize and propose a crowd simulation framework that includes actual crowd movement measurements, route choice model estimation, and crowd simulator construction. We use the Discrete choice model as the route choice model and the Social force model as the walking model. In experiments, we measure crowd movements during an evacuation drill in a theater and a firework event where tens of thousands of people moved and prove that the crowd simulation incorporating the route choice model can reproduce the real large-scale crowd movement more accurately.

When she's not writing, she works in hotel management. We increasingly use technology for a broad variety of purposes, and the more that happens, the more data we collect and store. These days, AI is transforming the way we utilize that information. Machines can read and learn from different types of data and then perform real-world tasks. That's true in almost every sector, but AI is also being used to simplify and improve how humans control crowds and populations worldwide.