Crowd control with swarm intelligence

This paper presents a uniform conceptual model based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) paradigm to simulate crowds in computer graphics. According to the mechanisms of PSO, each person (particle) in the crowd (swarm) can adopt the information to search a path from the initial position to the specified target (optimum) automatically. However, PSO aims to obtain the optimal solution, while the purpose of this study concentrates on the generated paths of particles. Hence, in order to generate appropriate paths of people in a crowd, we propose a method to employ the computational facilities provided in PSO. The proposed model is simple, uniform, and easy to implement. The results of simulations demonstrate that using PSO with the proposed technique can generate appropriate non-deterministic, non-colliding paths in several different scenarios, including static obstacles, moving targets, and multiple crowds.