SCA approach to micro-scale modelling of paradigmatic emergent crowd behaviors

The paper aims at comparing through theoretical experiments the Situated Cellular Agent (SCA) approach within pedestrian research dynamics context. In particular, we focus on two emerging patterns of pedestrians dynamics (i.e. freezing by heating and lane formation phenomena) that have been empirically observed in crowding situations and studied as self organizing phenomena. Although traditional approaches in this area (analytical particle-based models and Cellular Automata) have obtained successful results and are largely employed in applications to crowd management and architectural design, recently many efforts have been directed towards models based on Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) principles in order to overcome modelling expressiveness problems. The work presented in this paper aims at contributing to the research area focusing on MAS as an effective modelling approach for complex systems, providing an overview of the SCA modelling approach and its potential benefits to study crowds as complex systems, and showing its suitability through experimental comparisons.