Environmental abstraction and path planning techniques for realistic crowd simulation: Research Articles

This paper treats two linked subjects underlying behavioural simulation. First, the way to describe a virtual environment through an informed hierarchical abstract graph. This graph stores some pre-computations such as potential visibility sets, oriented grids, or densities of people, which can be used individually by simulated entities. Second, the way to use this abstract graph to perform a realistic and efficient path planning, which takes care of individual preferences as well as individual knowledge of the environment. Moreover, the path planning method we propose is reactive to some events, reflecting the perceived modifications of the environment, which allows the entity to adapt its behaviour in consequence. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.