Continuum crowd simulation in complex environments

This paper presents a novel approach for crowd simulation in complex environments. Our method is based on the continuum model proposed by Treuille et al. [13]. Compared to the original method, our solution is well-suited for complex environments. First, we present an environmental structure and a corresponding discretization scheme that helps us to organize and simulate crowds in large-scale scenarios. Second, additional discomfort zones around obstacles are auto-generated to keep a certain, psychologically plausible distance between pedestrians and obstacles, making it easier to obtain smoother trajectories when people move around these obstacles. Third, we propose a technique for density conversion; the density field is dynamically affected by each individual so that it can be adapted to different grid resolutions. The experiment results demonstrate that our hybrid solution can perform plausible crowd flow simulations in complex dynamic environments. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.