BioClouds: A Multi-level Model to Simulate and Visualize Large Crowds

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-level approach to simulate large crowds [18] called BioClouds. The goal of this work is to model larger groups of agents by simulating aggregation of agents as singular units. This approach combines microscopic and macroscopic simulation strategies, where each group of agents (called cloud) keeps the global characteristics of the crowd unity without simulating individuals. In addition to macroscopic strategy, BioClouds allows to alter from global to local behavior (individuals), providing more accurate simulation in terms of agents velocities and densities. We also propose a new model of visualization focused on larger simulated crowds but keeping the possibility of “zooming” individuals and see their behaviors. Results indicate that BioClouds presents coherent behaviors when compared to what is expected in global and individual levels. In addition, BioClouds provides an important speed up in processing time when compared to microcospic crowd simulators present in literature, being able to achieve until one million agents, organized in 2000 clouds and simulated at 86.85 ms per frame.