Integrating crowd-behavior modeling into military simulation using game technology

Abstract

Crowds of noncombatants play a large and increasingly recognized role in modern military operations and often create substantial difficulties for the combatant forces involved. However, realistic models of crowds are essentially absent from current military simulations. To address this problem, the authors are developing a crowd simulation capable of generating crowds of noncombatant civilians that exhibit a variety of realistic individual and group behaviors at differing levels of fidelity. The crowd simulation is interoperable with existing military simulations using a standard, distributed simulation architecture. Commercial game technology is used in the crowd simulation to model both urban terrain and the physical behaviors of the human characters that make up the crowd. The objective of this article is to present the design and development process of a simulation that integrates commercially available game technology with current military simulations to generate realistic and believable crowd behavior.

Computerized Simulation in the Social Sciences

“…Today, systems dynamics has evolved into multifaceted simulations that combine the multiple equation and decision tree algorithms of systems dynamics with agent simulation and 3D graphic rendering of avatars representing individuals. Resulting "agent dynamics" models have been used, for instance, by the U.S. military to model crowd actions in combat scenarios (see Bouvier & Guilloteau, 1996;McKenzie et al, 2008), including real-time image rendering of crowds (Tecchia, Loscos, & Chrysanthou, 2002). The crowd model described by McKenzie et al (2008), like other lines of simulation, benefits greatly from new software tools, many developed for other purposes, such as for the entertainment industry.…”

“…Software used in the agent dynamics model of crowd behavior in the Mogadishu, Somalia, crisis scenarios described by McKenzie et al (2008) included 3D Studio Max (for 3D terrain models, as used in video gaming), Terra-Vista's Database Automatic Re-Use Technology tool for interfacing terrain models with user databases (used in the real estate industry, for instance, for virtual tours, using Terra-Vista's new Intelligence Fusion Engine), Adobe Photoshop (for image manipulation, such as texturing buildings and objects for visualization purposes), Maya (3D modeling widely used in the gaming industry), and Presagis AI.implant (commercial gaming software for attaching decision tree rules to animated avatars). The AI.implant software implemented a wide variety of agent behaviors, such as avoid barriers, wander around, seek to, flee from, go between, follow path, align with, separate from, and many more.…”

Real-Time Large Crowd Rendering with Efficient Character and Instance Management on GPU

“…Each pair of position and orientation information defines the global status of a character at a given time frame. McKenzie et al [28] developed a crowd simulator to generate noncombatant civilian behaviors which is interoperable with a simulation of modern military operations. Zhou et al [29] classified the existing crowd modeling and simulation technologies based on the size and time scale of simulated crowds and evaluated them based on their flexibility, extensibility, execution efficiency, and scalability.…”

Multi agent design and implementation of crowd injury model

“…This paper focuses on a crowd injury model as a part of Crowd Modeling Project [8], which is an ongoing project at the Old Dominion University, to decide actions of pedestrians after a non lethal weapon (NLW) shot. UML design of the model is created and then Repast Simphony implementation is done to take advantages of Java 3D visualization features.…”