CROSS: Modelling Crowd Behaviour with Social-Cognitive Agents

The use of computer simulations in crowd research is a powerful tool to describe and analyse complex social systems. This paper presents CROSS, a generic framework to model crowd simulations as a social scientific tool for understanding crowd behaviour. In CROSS, individuals are represented by social-cognitive agents that are affected by their social and physical surroundings and produce cognition-based behaviour and behaviour patterns. Understanding is sought by relating intra- and inter-individual levels of behaviour generation with behaviour pattern emergence at group level. By specifying the CROSS framework for a festival context we demonstrate how CROSS meets the need for a theory that reflects the dynamic interplay between individuals and their environment as well as the need for a method that allows for testing.