A review on crowd simulation and modeling

Crowd simulation has emerged in the last decade as a widely used method of visual effects, computer games, and urban planning, etc. The improvement of hardware performance and the urgent need of special effect lead to an unprecedented wave of crowd simulation studies. This paper reports a review of crowd simulation models from traditional methods to recent methods (e.g. group simulation, emotion contagion). Traditional models can simulate general crowd dynamics which have the advantages of both microscopic and macroscopic models. The recent studies of crowd simulation from group simulation to social psychology crowds are possible to simulate realistic crowds. The purpose of this review is to introduce commonly used crowd simulation methods for newcomers to this field by making a systematic literature review, discussions and analysis of different models. The results reveal the traditional models can simulate most of the normal crowds, but lack expressiveness for special groups which needs to be solved urgently in the current applications, particularly on visual effects and urban planning. Group simulation and emotion contagion could improve the simulation realism, but it also needs to be improved in computation cost and model optimization. Also, future research directions are suggested aiming to develop new applications focused on more realistic, natural and efficient crowd simulation.