Controlling the movement of crowds in computer graphics by using the mechanism of particle swarm optimization

This paper presents a uniform conceptual model to co-operate with particle swarm optimization (PSO) for controlling the movement of crowds in computer graphics. According to the PSO mechanism, each particle in the swarm adopts the information to automatically find a path from the initial position to the optimum. However, PSO aims to obtain the optimal solution instead of the searching path, while the purpose of this work concentrates on the control of the crowd movement, which is composed of the generated searching paths of particles. Hence, in order to generate seemingly natural, appropriate paths of people in a crowd, we propose a model to work with the computational facilities provided in PSO. Compared to related approaches previously presented in the literature, the proposed model is simple, uniform, and easy to implement. The results of the conducted simulations demonstrate that the coupling of PSO and the proposed technique can generate appropriate non-deterministic, non-colliding paths for the use in computer graphics for several different scenarios, including static and dynamic obstacles, moving targets, and multiple crowds. (C) 2009 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.