Modeling group structures in pedestrian crowd simulation

Grouping is a common phenomenon in pedestrian crowds and plays important roles in affecting crowd behavior. Group modeling is still an open challenging problem and has not been incorporated by existing crowd simulation models. Motivated by the need of group modeling for crowd behavior simulation, this paper presents a unified and well-defined framework for modeling the structure aspect of different groups in a pedestrian crowd. Both intra-group structure and inter-group relationships are considered and their effects on the crowd behavior are modeled. Based on this framework, an agent-based crowd simulation system is developed and crowd behavior simulations using two different group structures are presented. The simulation results show that the developed framework allows different group structures to be easily modeled. Besides, different group sizes, intra-group structures and inter-group relationships can have significant impacts on crowd behavior.