Simulating large group behaviour in tawaf crowd

Abstract

Crowd simulation is one of the important fields in computer graphics. It helps us develop an understanding of the complexity and the degree of crowd interactions of people in spaces over time. Many techniques have been introduced to simulate crowd, especially in the past few decades. These techniques often focus on emergency situations rather than simulating the more common normal conditions. Simulating crowd under normal condition is of higher importance as there are significant number of crowd related incidents occurring under this condition. The most recent occurred in Mina, Saudi Arabia when two large pilgrim groups converged on the same street causing a crowd crush. Additionally, many of the crowd simulation techniques introduced tend to focus more on individual behaviours while group behaviours are ignored. Less attention were given on the grouping aspects of the crowd even though it is a common phenomenon and a key element as it affects crowd behaviour. Therefore, this research intends to create a simulation of multi-group crowd under normal condition based on the social force model. Tawaf is used as the case study due to the heterogeneous nature of the pilgrims which come from various countries from all over the world.