Crowd Turbulence With ABM and Verlet Integration on GPU Cards.

Managing crowds is a key problem in a world with a growing population. Being able to predict and manage possible disasters directly affects the safety of crowd events. Current simulations focus mostly on navigation, but crowds have their own special characteristics and phenomena. Under specific conditions, a mass can turn into a crowd turbulence which may lead to a possible disaster. Understanding the internal phenomena is an important issue in order to model behavior. In the particular case of crowd turbulence, agents are moved by the crowd by a series of pushes, an involuntary movement that can be hard to reproduce. We propose a simple model to implement this complex problem based on intentional and involuntary interactions among the agents. The implementation is a hybrid model between the Verlet integration method and Agent Based Modeling. We implemented the proposed model using C and OpenCL and we evaluated its performance on a Nvidia GPU.