Simulation of past life: Controlling agent behaviors from the interactions between ethnic groups

Many efforts have been carried out in preserving the history and culture of Penang and also other regions of Malaysia since George Town was elected as a UNESCO living heritage city. This paper presents a method to simulate life in a local trading port in the 1800s, where various populations with very different social rules interacted with each other. These populations included Indian coolies, Malay vendors, British colonists and Chinese traders. The challenge is to model these ethnic groups as autonomous agents, and to capture the changes of behavior due to inter-ethnic interactions and to the arrival of boats at the pier. Agents from each population are equipped with a specific set of steering methods which are selected and parameterized according to predefined behavioral patterns (graphs of states). In this paper, we propose a new formalism where interactions between the different ethnics groups and with the boats can be either activated globally or locally. Global interactions cause changes of states for all the agents belonging to the target population, while local interactions only take place between specific agents, and result in changes of states for these agents only. The main contributions of our method are: i) Applying microscopic crowd simulation to the complex case of a multi-ethnic trading port, involving different behavioral patterns; ii) Introducing a high-level control method, through the interethnic interactions formalism. The resulting system generates a variety of real-time animations, all reflecting the adequate social behaviors. Such a system would be particularly useful in a virtual tour application.