Modeling of crowd groups with an extended social field model

Abstract

Abstract A social field model is extended by adding supports of simulations of crowd group related dynamics such as group cohesion, back-tracking, etc. A computational implementation combining heterogeneous computing and multi-threading technologies is developed to integrate the proposed extension into a heterogeneous computing framework. Hence modeling of group related dynamics can be accomplished in a very efficient manner. In the section of numerical experiments, the extended model is firstly validated with a set of practical data. Results show that the simulated evacuation time matches the practical one quite well. Then a study of fundamental diagrams is expanded with considerations of crowd groups. It is shown that the impact of crowd groups mainly happens in the regime of low densities and would become insignificant in the regime of high densities.