Why and how physically-based model are able to model emergent crowd behaviors?

International audienceThis paper has been written as a position paper on the concepts of emergence, individual / collective paradox, from philosophical and experimental point of view. It presents successively : 1) some sociological and philosophical issues related to collective emergent behaviors ; 2) a non-conventional point of view of physical particle modeling as a cellular automata systems ; 3) a proposition of a generic physical particle model for emergent collective phenomena. It shows that this model is able to render the main expected figures of non-deliberative emergent collective phenomena as those that define crowd behaviors