Menge: A Modular Framework for Simu- lating Crowd Movement

We present Menge, a cross-platform, extensible, modular framework for sim1 ulating pedestrian movement in a crowd. Menge’s architecture is inspired by an implicit 2 decomposition of the problem of simulating crowds into component subproblems. These 3 subproblems can typically be solved in many ways; different combinations of subproblem 4 solutions yield crowd simulators with likewise varying properties. Menge creates abstrac5 tions for those subproblems and provides a plug-in architecture so that a novel simulator 6 can be dynamically configured by connecting built-in and bespoke implementations of so7 lutions to the various subproblems. Use of this type of framework could facilitate crowd 8 simulation research, evaluation, and applications by reducing the cost of entering the do9 main, facilitating collaboration, and making comparisons between algorithms simpler. 10 We show how the Menge framework is compatible with many prior models and algo11 rithms used in crowd simulation and illustrate its flexibility via a varied set of scenarios 12 and applications. 13