Simulating riot for virtual crowds with a social communication model

Abstract

In this work we attempt to build a communication model to simulate a large variety of collective behaviors in the course of riot formation for virtual crowd. The proposed crowd simulation system, IMCrowd, has been implemented with a multi-agent system in which each agent has a local perception and autonomous abilities to improvise their actions. The algorithms used in our communication model in IMCrowd are based heavily on sociology research. Therefore, the collective behaviors can emerge out of the social process such as emotion contagion and conformity effect among individual agents. We have conducted several riot experiments and have reported the details of the correlation between the severity of a riot and three predefined factors: the size of the crowd, relative size of the parties, and initial position distribution of the crowd. We have found that crowd density and party size symmetry do affect the number of victims at the end. However, the initial distribution of the two parties does not significantly influence the index (number of victims) at the end. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.