Crowd modeling and control in a RoboCup rescue domain

Robocup Rescue is a research initiative on disaster mitigation, search and rescue problems. Rescue Simulation is a sub-domain that domain aims at increasing the understanding of disasters at a macroscopic(i.e.city-wide) level and exploring new ways for disaster management. In this graduation project, we extended the simulation with a model of human crowd behavior, Crowd Simulator. The choice of the modeling approach was determined by the specific characteristics of disaster domains and by the need to model realistically large numbers of civilians, yet keep the computational complexity of the simulation low. The approach chosen, flow modeling, uses the characteristics common to all individuals in a group to describe the group behavior. A probabilistic framework is used to derive group behavior from individual transition probabilities on every location. These individual probabilities correspond to the subjective attractiveness of the current location and its neighbor-location(s). Altogether, typical human behavior in disaster circumstances is shown by the crowd simulator.