Fast simulation of crowd collision avoidance

Real-time large-scale crowd simulations with realistic behavior, are important for many application areas. On CPUs, the ORCA pedestrian steering model is often used for agent-based pedestrian simulations. This paper introduces a technique for running the ORCA pedestrian steering model on the GPU. Performance improvements of up to 30 times greater than a multi-core CPU model are demonstrated. This improvement is achieved through a specialized linear program solver on the GPU and spatial partitioning of information sharing. This allows over 100,000 people to be simulated in real time (60 frames per second)

Position-Based Multi-Agent Dynamics for Real-Time Crowd Simulation (MiG paper)

Exploiting the efficiency and stability of Position-Based Dynamics (PBD), we introduce a novel crowd simulation method that runs at interactive rates for hundreds of thousands of agents. Our method enables the detailed modeling of per-agent behavior in a Lagrangian formulation. We model short-range and long-range collision avoidance to simulate both sparse and dense crowds. On the particles representing agents, we formulate a set of positional constraints that can be readily integrated into a standard PBD solver. We augment the tentative particle motions with planning velocities to determine the preferred velocities of agents, and project the positions onto the constraint manifold to eliminate colliding configurations. The local short-range interaction is represented with collision and frictional contact between agents, as in the discrete simulation of granular materials. We incorporate a cohesion model for modeling collective behaviors and propose a new constraint for dealing with potential future collisions. Our new method is suitable for use in interactive games.Comment: 9 page