RightsACM allow an authors' version of their own ACMcopyrighted work on their personal server or on servers belonging to their employers. As a collective and highly dynamic social group, human crowd is a fascinating phenomenon which has been constantly concerned by experts from various areas. Recently, computer-based modeling and simulation technologies have emerged to support investigation of the dynamics of crowds, such as a crowd's behaviors under normal and emergent situations. This paper assesses the major existing technologies for crowd modeling and simulation. We first propose a two-dimensional categorization mechanism to classify existing work depending on the size of crowds and the timescale of the crowd phenomena of interest. Four evaluation criteria have also been introduced to evaluate existing crowd simulation systems from the point of view of both a modeler and an end-user. We have discussed some influential existing work in crowd modeling and simulation regarding their major features, performance as well as the technologies used in these work. We have also discussed some open problems in the area. This paper will provide the researchers with useful information and insights on the state-of-the-art of the technologies in crowd modeling and simulation as well as future research directions.

In the face of globalization and rapidly shrinking product life cycle, manufacturing companies are trying different means to improve productivity through management of machine utilization and product cycle-time. Job shop scheduling is an important task for manufacturing industry in terms of improving machine utilization and reducing cycle-time. However, job shop scheduling is inherently a NPhard problem with no easy solution. This paper describes a novel approach that uses the honey bees foraging model to solve the job shop scheduling problem. Experimental results comparing the proposed honey bee colony approach with existing approaches such as ant colony and tabu search will be presented.

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Human crowd is a fascinating social phenomenon in nature. This paper presents our work on designing behavior model for virtual humans in a crowd simulation under normal-life and emergency situations. Our model adopts an agent-based approach and employs a layered framework to reflect the natural pattern of human-like decision making process, which generally involves a person's awareness of the situation and consequent changes on the internal attributes. The social group and crowd-related behaviors are modeled according to the findings and theories observed from social psychology (e.g., social attachment theory). By integrating our model into an agent execution process, each individual agent can response differently to the perceived environment and make realistic behavioral decisions based on various physiological, emotional, and social group attributes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, a case study has been conducted, which shows that realistic human behaviors can be generated at both individual and group level.

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This paper reports on the progress made toward the emergence of standards to support the integration of heterogeneous discrete-event simulations (DESs) created in specialist support tools called commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) discrete-event simulation packages (CSPs). The general standard for heterogeneous integration in this area has been developed from research in distributed simulation and is the IEEE 1516 standard The High Level Architecture (HLA). However, the specific needs of heterogeneous CSP integration require that the HLA is augmented by additional complementary standards. These are the suite of CSP interoperability (CSPI) standards being developed under the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO-http://www.sisostds.org) by the CSPI Product Development Group (CSPI-PDG). The suite consists of several interoperability reference models (IRMs) that outline different integration needs of CSPI, interoperability frameworks (IFs) that define the HLA-based solution to each IRM, appropriate data exchange representations to specify the data exchanged in an IF, and benchmarks termed CSP emulators (CSPEs). This paper contributes to the development of the Type I IF that is intended to represent the HLA-based solution to the problem outlined by the Type I IRM (asynchronous entity passing) by developing the entity transfer specification (ETS) data exchange representation. The use of the ETS in an illustrative case study implemented using a prototype CSPE is shown. This case study also allows us to highlight the importance of event granularity and lookahead in the performance and development of the Type I IF, and to discuss possible methods to automate the capture of appropriate values of lookahead.

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