Proposal

Simulating Affinity, Goals and Determination of Characters in a Crowd System

D.D.A.C.J.Jayalath 09000526

Submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements of the B.Sc in Computer Science 4th Year Individual Project (SCS4001)

3rd of March, 2013

Preface
This is a proposal for a 4th Year Individual Project for partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at University of Colombo School of Computing, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

This proposal provides the scope and context of the project to be undertaken. It details the aims and research questions, background, methodology and project design. This document also provides a schedule for the completion of the project, including a description of anticipated results and final products.

The intended audience of this document is the academic staff of the University Of Colombo School Of Computing so that they may determine whether the project should be approved as proposed, approved with modifications, or not approved.

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Table of Contents
Preface.................................................................................................................................ii Table of Contents................................................................................................................iii 1.0Research Aim and Research Questions..........................................................................1 Aim and Objectives..........................................................................................................1 Research Questions..........................................................................................................1 Introduction..........................................................................................................................2 Literature Review.............................................................................................................2 Assumptions and Constraints...........................................................................................3 Methodology and Project Design.........................................................................................4 Data Gathering ................................................................................................................4 Evaluation........................................................................................................................4 Project Schedule ..................................................................................................................5 Anticipated Results/Final Products......................................................................................6 Students personal statement................................................................................................6 References............................................................................................................................6

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1.0 Research Aim and Research Questions

Aim and Objectives
Three interrelated key concepts will be considered in the project. They are Affinity (affinity between characters), Goals (each character can have a set of goals), and Determination (determination of a character for achieving his goals). The main goal of the project is to come up with a model for simulating crowd behavior which exhibits these three key concepts. Throughout the early phases of the project, behavior models for simulating crowd behaviors will be investigated thoroughly and they will be compared with each other. Then the related works that could be used to model Affinity/Goals/Determination will be identified. A model will be designed with the influence from the related works. The evaluation of the behavior model will be mainly focusing on the realism of the crowd behavior in the sense of exhibiting the three key concepts described above. Each concept will be evaluated separately and then all three will be evaluated at once.

Research Questions
Scope of the questions addressed in the project is how far the selected behavior model can simulate Affinity/Goal/Determination of characters in real world? This can be formed to questions as, What level of realism the selected model can output for Affinity between characters in a large crowd? What level of realism the selected model can output for Determination of characters in a large crowd? What level of realism the selected model can output for Goal-Orientated characters in a large crowd? To what level of realism the selected model can exhibit Affinity, Goals and Determination of a large crowd?

Introduction
Crowd Systems are used in games, movies, medicine, urban planning, etc. for immersing the user/audience or to evaluate some measurements that affects or is affected by crowd. There are various technologies that can be used for modeling crowd systems such as Agent Systems, Vector Fields, etc. (a crowd is considered to be a large set of characters who could be human or non-human). Following is an example scenario that exhibits the Affinity, Goals and Determination of characters in the real world. Three friends A, B, and C are walking through a crowd to a bus station. All of them want to get on a bus. Three friends are closer to each other but C is a little bit ahead of A and B. A bus comes but its harder for A and B to reach it due to crowd while C has a clear path to the bus. C will take the opportunity and get into the bus without considering about friends (breaking affinity for achieving the goal : exhibits determination). The research conducted in the project will focus on simulating this kind of situations in a crowd system.

Literature Review
Crowd Systems can be modeled using various methods such as Agent based methods, Motion Patches, Rule based methods, Cellular Automata based methods, Particle simulation methods, etc. Agent based methods uses many (relatively simple) intelligent agents to solve a problem rather than using single intelligent agent with complex algorithms. There are many types/models of multi agent systems. Most of them fit for crowds/swarm simulation. Reynolds showed that flocking behaviors of birds can be simulated using simple rules for each individual agent (Reynolds 1987). Pelechano et al worked on a multi agent system that uses a cognitive approach (Pelechano 2005) which considers psychology, and communication of characters. He used the PMFserv (Silverman 2006) as a technology. Merrik et al showed good progress on a single agent model which uses Motivation factor (Merrik 2006).

Motion Patches is an interesting idea designed by Lee et al. (Lee 2006) where the environment consists of virtual artifacts such as stairs, terrains, chairs, tables, etc. which are made of blocks. Each block has its own set of motion paths which are called motion patches. The agents can animate according to these motion patches when they are on a particular block. The system works well with a large number or agents. However the solution seems to be somewhat similar to cellular automata, which makes the Motion Patches method inherit some problems of cellular automata (e.g. the underlying cell structure could get revealed to the audience after some time which decreases the realism of the simulation) Cell Automata is also another system that uses emergent technique. It uses a large 2D lattice as a guidance grid for almost all the calculations done on the simulation. Rule based systems work well when the crowd density is low. But when the crowd density is increased they lack realism when the crowd density is high or when simulating crowd panic behaviors. There are more methodologies which are related to crowd systems (especially cognitive models). Further literature search will be conducted throughout the project for identifying them and for evaluating them.

Assumptions and Constraints

The behavior patterns of people in different countries/regions are different. This project will focus on one particular type of behavior which assumes the crowds are behaving legally and ethically. But in cases such as Sri Lanka, we can see that some people tend to do barging (cutting in line). Though these kinds of determination levels exist in the real world, modeling these kinds of specialized/localized behaviors will be considered as a future work of this project. If successful, this model could also be used to increase the behavior diversity of a crowd system. Then should be considered as a future work, the crowd diversity will not be considered in evaluation of project.

Methodology and Project Design

The steps can be defined as follows, Investigate crowd simulation models and techniques suitable for simulating a queue system of an airport. Select a model/technique for the simulation. Design a simulation methodology/algorithm based on the selected model/technique. Investigate evaluation methods for the design. Select evaluation criteria and design an evaluation procedure. Design and implement a visual environment for testing and evaluating the design prototype. Implement a prototype of the design. Evaluate the design using the prototype according to the selected evaluation criteria.

Data Gathering
Any required data gathering will be done in the required steps. Especially for evaluation the data such as videos of real world crowd behaviors could be gathered from CCTV cameras, television broadcasts, etc.

Evaluation
Evaluation will be done on the realism of the model. The concepts Affinity, Goals, Determination will be evaluated separately and at once. The evaluation will be human perception based (Gunaratne 2012) or by comparison of real vs. simulated scenarios (Guy 2010)

Project Schedule
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Anticipated Results/Final Products

A design of a behavior model for simulating Affinity, Goals, Determination oriented crowd. A prototype that that demonstrates the above behavior model. Evaluation criteria for the design prototype. Testing and evaluation information of the evaluations done on the design prototype.

Students personal statement

Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are two of my favorite areas of study. I always enjoy working on these subjects though I have only relatively smaller knowledge on AI systems than on VR. I always wanted to do some project which brings both these subjects together.

References
Gunaratne, C., 2012. Simulating Gait and Postural Effects of Aging for Improved Diversity in Virtual Crowds. University of Colombo, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Guy, S.J., Chhugani, J., Curtis, S., Dubey, P., Lin, M., Manocha, D., 2010. PLEdestrians: A Least-Effort Approach to Crowd Simulation. Lee, K.H., Lee, J., 2006. Motion Patches: Building Blocks for Virtual Environments Annotated with Motion Data 1, 898906. Merrick, K., Maher, M. Lou, 2006. Motivated reinforcement learning for non-player characters in persistent computer game worlds. Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology - ACE 06 3. Pelechano, N., Brien, K.O., Silverman, B., Badler, N., 2005. Crowd Simulation Incorporating Agent Psychological Models , Roles and Communication. Reynolds, C.W., 1987. Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 21, 2534.

Silverman, B.G., Johns, M., Cornwell, J., OBrien, K., 2006. Human Behavior Models for Agents in Simulators and Games: Part I: Enabling Science with PMFserv. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 15, 139162.