Modelling non-linear crowd dynamics in bio-PEPA

  • Authors:

  • Mieke Massink;Diego Latella;Andrea Bracciali;Jane Hillston

  • Affiliations:

  • Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione 'A. Faedo', CNR, Italy;Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione 'A. Faedo', CNR, Italy;Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione 'A. Faedo', CNR, Italy and Department of Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling, U.K.;School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, U.K.

  • Venue:
  • FASE'11/ETAPS'11 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Fundamental approaches to software engineering: part of the joint European conferences on theory and practice of software
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Emergent phenomena occur due to the pattern of non-linear and distributed local interactions between the elements of a system over time. Surprisingly, agent based crowd models, in which the movement of each individual follows a limited set of simple rules, often reproduce quite closely the emergent behaviour of crowds that can be observed in reality. An example of such phenomena is the spontaneous self-organisation of drinking parties in the squares of cities in Spain, also known as "El Botellón" [20]. We revisit this case study providing an elegant stochastic process algebraic model in Bio-PEPA amenable to several forms of analyses, among which simulation and fluid flow analysis. We show that a fluid flow approximation, i.e. a deterministic reading of the average behaviour of the system, can provide an alternative and efficient way to study the same emergent behaviour as that explored in [20] where simulation was used instead. Besides empirical evidence, also an analytical justification is provided for the good correspondence found between simulation results and the fluid flow approximation.