Abstract
Social groups are often an essential part of pedestrian crowds and influence their behaviour. In order to describe not only the influence of social groups in evacuations on entire pedestrian crowds, but also the dynamics of the groups themselves, we introduce a new set of quantitative group parameters. This set includes (1) the centre of mass of social groups with its velocity and orientation and (2) the shape of the groups. They are approximated as an ellipse of minimal area while containing all social group members. The main properties of this ellipse give some indication about the dynamics of the members, whereas the centre of mass quantities describe the dynamics of an entire social group. By combining both aspects it is possible to determine whether the members order along the group’s direction of movement. Additionally, the orientation of the social groups is determined via a gyration tensor approach. All quantities are determined from data of an experimental study on the influence of social groups on pedestrian evacuation dynamics. This study investigated several evacuation scenarios with groups and was performed in schools. Young adults performed evacuation runs including social groups of different sizes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aveni, A.F.: The not-so-lonely crowd: friendship groups on collective behavior. Sociometry 40(1), 96–99 (1977)
Ballerini, M., Cabibbo, N., Candelier, R., Cavagna, A., Cisbani, E., Giardina, I., Orlandi, A., Parisi, G., Procaccini, A., Viale, M., Zdravkovic, V.: Empirical investigation of starling flocks: a benchmark study in collective animal behavior. Anim. Behav. 76, 201–215 (2008)
Bode, N.W.F.: The effect of social groups and gender on pedestrian behaviour immediately in front of bottlenecks. In: 8th International Conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics, pp. 92–99. University of Science and Technology of China Press, Hefei (2016)
Bode, N.W.F., Holl, S., Mehner, W., Seyfried, A.: Disentangling the impact of social groups on response times and movement dynamics in evacuations. PLoS One 10, e0121227 (2015)
Boltes, M., Seyfried, A., Steffen, B., Schadschneider, A.: Automatic extraction of pedestrian trajectories from video recordings. In: Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2008, pp. 43–54. Springer, Berlin (2010)
Guo, N., Jiang, R., Hu, M.B., Ding, J.X., Ding, Z.J.: Escaping in couples facilitates evacuation: experimental study and modeling. arXiv:1512.05120 (2015)
Köster, G., Seitz, M.J., Treml, F., Hartmann, D., Klein, W.: On modelling the influence of group formations in a crowd. Contemp. Soc. Sci. 6, 397–414 (2011)
Mauer, J.: Shapes and dynamics of blood cells in Poiseuille and shear flows. Ph.D. thesis, Universität zu Köln (2016)
Moshtag, N.: MATLAB File Exchange (2006). http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/9542-minimum-volume-enclosing-ellipsoid/content/MinVolEllipse.m
Moshtag, N.: MATLAB File Exchange (2007). http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/13844-plot-an-ellipse-in--center-form-
Moussaïd, M., Perozo, N., Garnier, S., Helbing, D., Theraulaz, G.: The walking behavior of pedestrian social groups and its impact on crowd dynamics. PLoS One 5, e10047 (2010)
Oberhagemann, D., Könnecke, R., Schneider, V.: Effect of social groups on crowd dynamics: empirical findings and numerical simulations. In: Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2012, pp. 1251–1258. Springer, Berlin (2013)
Reuter, V., Berger, B.S., Köster, G., Seitz, M.J., Hartmann, D.: On modeling groups in crowds: empirical evidence and simulation results including large groups. In: Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2012, pp. 835–845. Springer, Berlin (2014)
von Krüchten, C., Schadschneider, A.: Empirical study on social groups in pedestrian evacuation dynamics. Phys. A 475, 129–141 (2017)
Xu, S., Duh, H.B.L.: A simulation of bonding effects and their impacts on pedestrian dynamics. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. 11, 153–161 (2010)
Acknowledgements
We thank the teams of Forschungszentrum Jülich and University Wuppertal and the pupils and teachers of the participating schools. Financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG) under grant SCHA 636/9-1 and Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy (BCGS) is gratefully acknowledged.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
von Krüchten, C., Schadschneider, A. (2019). Group Parameters for Social Groups in Evacuation Scenarios. In: Hamdar, S. (eds) Traffic and Granular Flow '17. TGF 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11440-4_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11440-4_29
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11439-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11440-4
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)