Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 918497, 15 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/918497
Research Article

Parallel Motion Simulation of Large-Scale Real-Time Crowd in a Hierarchical Environmental Model

Xin Wang,1 Jianhua Zhang,2 and Massimo Scalia3

1College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China
2TAMS Group, Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Vogt-Koelln-Straße 30, 22527 Hamburg, Germany
3Department of Mathematics, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 2, 00185 Rome, Italy

Received 17 February 2012; Accepted 28 March 2012

Academic Editor: Carlo Cattani

Copyright © 2012 Xin Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents a parallel real-time crowd simulation method based on a hierarchical environmental model. A dynamical model of the complex environment should be constructed to simulate the state transition and propagation of individual motions. By modeling of a virtual environment where virtual crowds reside, we employ different parallel methods on a topological layer, a path layer and a perceptual layer. We propose a parallel motion path matching method based on the path layer and a parallel crowd simulation method based on the perceptual layer. The large-scale real-time crowd simulation becomes possible with these methods. Numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the methods and results.