Having experience writing crowd simulations in both games and VFX in film, I suggest you take a look at Massive, and perhaps read some of their documentation to

Having experience writing crowd simulations in both games and VFX in film, I suggest you take a look at Massive, and perhaps read some of their documentation to learn how this successful implementation handles crowd simulations: https://www.massivesoftware.com/ https://www.massivesoftware.com/