Date of Award

Winter 2011

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Committee Director

Jiang Li

Committee Member

Frederic D. McKenzie

Committee Member

Yuzhong Shen

Committee Member

Fuat Ince

Abstract

A major concern of many government agencies is to predict and control the behavior of crowds in different situations. Many times such gatherings are legal, legitimate, and peaceful. But there are times when they can turn violent, run out of control, result in material damages and even casualties. It then becomes the duty of governments to bring them under control using a variety of techniques, including non-lethal and lethal weapons, if necessary.

In order to aid decision makers on the course of action in crowd control, there are modeling and simulation tools that can provide guidelines by giving programmed rules to computer animated characters and to observe behaviors over time in appropriate scenarios. A crowd is a group of people attending a public gathering, with some joint purpose, such as protesting government or celebrating an event. In some countries these kinds of activities are the only way to express public's displeasure with their governments. The governments' reactions to such activities may or may not be tolerant. For these reasons, such situations must be eliminated by recognizing when and how they occur and then providing guidelines to mitigate them.

Police or military forces use non-lethal weapons (NLWs), such as plastic bullets or clubs, to accomplish their job. In order to simulate the results of such actions in a computer, there is a need to determine the physical effects of NLWs over the individuals in the crowd.

In this dissertation, a fuzzy logic based crowd injury model for determining the physical effects of NLWs is proposed. Fuzzy logic concepts can be applied to a problem by using linguistic rules, which are determined by problem domain experts. In this case, a group of police and military officers were consulted for a set of injury model rules and those rules were then included in the simulation platform. As a proof of concept, a prototype system was implemented using the Repast Simphony agent based simulation toolkit. Simulation results illustrated the effectiveness of the simulation framework.

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DOI

10.25777/sy9j-h787

ISBN

9781267108975

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