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Crowd simulation: applying mobile grids to the social force model

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Abstract

The social force model (SF) is able to reproduce many emergent phenomena observed in real crowds. Unfortunately, in some situations, such as low density environments, SF may produce counterintuitive results where the trajectories simulated look more like particles than to real people. We modify the SF model through the use of a mobile grid to allow the simulated pedestrians to change the direction of their desired velocity at reasonable times, thus avoiding nearby blocked or crowded areas smoothly. Our experiments focus on qualitative behavior, and verify that our model produces the desired trajectories of the pedestrians, achieving softer and more coherent trajectories when compared to the pure SF model solution. Like SF, our model reproduces the “faster-is-slower” and the arching underlying the clogging effects. Finally, we examine the occupation rates of the space when pedestrians were submitted to narrowed corridors and observe the “edge effect.”

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank CNPq, CAPES, and FAPESP for the financial support. We also express our gratitude to Dirk Helbing, Illés Farkas, and Tamás Vicsek for kindly providing us with their source code.

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  1. Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Priscila Saboia & Siome Goldenstein

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  1. Priscila Saboia
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  2. Siome Goldenstein
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Correspondence to Priscila Saboia.

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Saboia, P., Goldenstein, S. Crowd simulation: applying mobile grids to the social force model. Vis Comput 28, 1039–1048 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-012-0731-y

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