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.
Observations are frequently used to examine naturally occurring behavior. The researchers used this tool to determine what types of behaviors crowds exhibited and the degree of aggression expressed by the crowds. Footage of the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle was examined and coded for 55 behaviors. Of the observed behaviors standing on an elevated platform, chanting, yelling and shouting, and raising flags were the most frequent behaviors. Overall, most of the action was moderately aggressive. Highly aggressive behaviors such as fighting and attacking police officers composed only 1% of the observed behaviors. A similar observation was conducted of an anti-war protest in New York. This observation found comparable results of prevalent nonviolent behaviors. The findings from these studies along with those obtained from interviews of returning military officers will be used to develop a model for simulation of crowd behaviors.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.