Systems to simulate crowd-behavior are used to simulate the evacuation of a crowd in case of an emergency. These systems are limited to the moving-patterns of a crowd and are generally not considering psychological and/or physical conditions. Changing behaviors within the crowd (e.g. by a person falling down) are not considered.
For that reason, this thesis will examine the psychological behavior and the physical impact of a crowd- member on the crowd. In order to do so, this study develops a real-time simulation for a crowd of people, adapted from a system for video games. This system contains a behavior-AI for agents. In order to show physical interaction between the agents and their environment as well as their movements, the physical representation of each agent is realized by using rigid bodies from a physics-engine. The movements of the agents have an additional navigation mesh and an algorithm for collision avoidance.
By developing a behavior-AI a physical and psychological state is reached. This state contains a psychological stress-level as well as a physical condition. The developed simulation is able to show physical impacts such as crowding and crushing of agents, interaction of agents with their environment as well as factors of stress.
By evaluating several tests of the simulation, this thesis examines whether the combination of physical and psychological impacts is implementable successfully. If so, this thesis will be able to give indications of an agent- behavior in dangerous and/or stressful situations as well as a valuation of the complex physical representation.
The goal of simulations in computergraphics is the simulation of realistic phenomena of materials. Therefore, internal and external acting forces are accumulated in each timestep. From those, new velocities get calculated that ultimately change the positions of geometry or particles. Position Based Dynamics omits thie velocity layer and directly works on the positions. Constraints are a set of rules defining the simulated material. Those rules must not be violated throughout the simulation. If this happens, the violating positions get changed so that the constraints get fullfilled once again. In this work a PBD-framework gets implemented, that allows simulations of solids and fluids. Constraints get solved using GPU implementations of Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Jakobi solvers. Results are physically plausible simulations that are real-time capable.