ACMICS: an agent communication model for interacting crowd simulation

• Published in: Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems Vol. 31; no. 6; pp. 1403 - 1423
• Main Authors: Kullu, Kurtulus, Güdükbay, Uğur, Manocha, Dinesh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.11.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Communication; Computer Science; Computer simulation; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Human behavior; Human communication; Simulation; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Unknown environments; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA); Crowd simulation; Communication model; Agent Communication Language (ACL); Agent communication
• ISSN: 1387-2532; 1573-7454
• DOI: 10.1007/s10458-017-9366-8

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.