Guide them through: An automatic crowd control framework using multi-objective genetic programming.

•We propose an automatic framework based on genetic programming to generate crowd control strategies.•We propose a Multi-Objective Cartesian Genetic Programming (MO-CGP) algorithm capable of evolving not only parameters but also rule structures so as to find optimal control strategies for multi-objective optimization.•We demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in a real life crowd control scenario to guide approximately 400 participants to pass through a multi-story building with shorter travel time and reduced congestion at hotspot segments, comparing to several common baseline crowd models.•We propose a rule analysis method through feature selection machine to identify a limited number of most important features in the evolved rules from GP algorithm effectively.