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ACMICS: an agent communication model for interacting crowd simulation

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Abstract

Behavioral plausibility is one of the major aims of crowd simulation research. We present a novel approach that simulates communication between the agents and assess its influence on overall crowd behavior. Our formulation uses a communication model that tends to simulate human-like communication capability. The underlying formulation is based on a message structure that corresponds to a simplified version of Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents Agent Communication Language Message Structure Specification. Our algorithm distinguishes between low- and high-level communication tasks so that ACMICS can be easily extended and employed in new simulation scenarios. We highlight the performance of our communication model on different crowd simulation scenarios. We also extend our approach to model evacuation behavior in unknown environments. Overall, our communication model has a small runtime overhead and can be used for interactive simulation with tens or hundreds of agents.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) under Grant No. 112E110. Additionally, the first author was supported by a scholarship (support type 2214-A) by TÜBİTAK to visit the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We would like to thank Sarah George from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for proofreading the paper.

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Correspondence to Uğur Güdükbay.

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Kullu, K., Güdükbay, U. & Manocha, D. ACMICS: an agent communication model for interacting crowd simulation. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 31, 1403–1423 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-017-9366-8

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