A Framework for Modeling Social Groups in Agent-Based Pedestrian Crowd Simulations

Grouping is a common phenomenon in pedestrian crowds and social groups can have significant impacts on crowd behavior. Despite its importance, how to model social groups in pedestrian crowd simulations is still an open and challenging issue. This paper presents a framework for modeling social groups in agent-based pedestrian crowd simulations. The developed framework integrates agent behavior modeling, group modeling, and social context modeling in a layered architecture, where each layer focuses on modeling a specific aspect of pedestrian crowds. A model of dynamic grouping behavior is developed to demonstrate the utility of the developed framework, and experimental results are presented.