A floor field is a spatial grid or potential map overlaid on a simulated environment that encodes directional guidance information — such as distance-to-exit, obstacle proximity, or crowd density — used to govern pedestrian movement decisions at each discrete cell or continuous location. It matters because it provides a computationally efficient mechanism for translating global navigation goals and local crowd interactions into individual agent steering behaviors, enabling scalable simulation of both sparse and dense crowd dynamics without requiring each agent to perform costly global path planning at every timestep. Key variants include the static floor field, which captures fixed environmental features like shortest-path distances to targets, and the dynamic floor field, which evolves over time to reflect the transient influence of other pedestrians, effectively encoding virtual traces of prior movement that produce emergent phenomena such as lane formation and clogging near bottlenecks.
Source Papers
- A crowd team evacuation model considering spring effect ↗ — A crowd team evacuation model considering spring effect
- Physics of Human Crowds ↗ — Physics of Human Crowds
- State-of-the-art crowd motion simulation models ↗ — State-of-the-art crowd motion simulation models
- Vadere: An Open-Source Simulation Framework to Promote Interdisciplinary Understanding ↗ — Vadere: An Open-Source Simulation Framework to Promote Inter