Distracted Agents in Crowd Simulations

Crowd simulations can provide meaningful insights about crowd movement and flow in arbitrary environments, which is useful for predictive planning and analysis. High fidelity agents and simulations are important factors in the quality of the analysis and their validity. Historically, agents in crowd simulations have been largely homogeneous in terms of physical and behavioural properties. However, this homogenous structure does not accurately reflect crowds seen in the real world, which are largely heterogeneous in a wide variety of aspects including behaviours. In particular, distracted behaviour in crowds has been largely ignored in crowd simulations to date. The use of cellular phones has become one of the most commonly observed distracted behaviour in real world urban crowds. This thesis presents a first step towards modelling this important phenomenon in crowd simulations.