A model for flexible representation of social groups in crowd simulation

Taking into consideration the behavior of social groups, such as groups of friends, couples and families, is very important in crowd simulation. Existing approaches of group modeling offer little flexibility for customizing the structure of the groups and the relationships between their members, which limits their representation power. Often, those approaches also have limitations regarding their ability to represent groups of arbitrary sizes, as well as to represent certain aspects of the groups' cohesion, such as the ability of modeling how their members will walk together and whether they will follow the same routes. This work proposes a way of modeling groups with different structures, in which roles of leadership can be assigned to some of their members. The approach can also represent groups of arbitrary sizes that may consist of subgroups, and treat different levels of relationships between their members. Moreover, the groups can be modeled in such a way that their members show either a strong cohesion with one another or a loose cohesion, in which the members behave more autonomously when dealing with collision avoidance and choice of routes. Nevertheless, the sense of group is always present as the model offers the ability of regrouping whenever one or more members of a group are left behind. The model also includes a new personality factor that represents the urge of the group members to move towards their destinations when they experience a strong impedance from the crowd. The approach is based on states that the pedestrians can assume based on their profiles and on the social forces model. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.