Modelling Emergent Crowd Behaviour

Using a cellular automata approach we create models of people movement within buildings. Simple, local update rules capturing the movement of individuals are shown to produce realistic behaviour of crowds, that is, collections of individuals. We demonstrate how distinct crowd behaviour at constriction points is characterised using different update rules. These distinct rules are produced in an experimental manner; we utilise a simulation environment to examine various crowd movement scenarios with the resulting crown dynamics being revealed by graphical animation.