Effect of Group Behavior on Crowd Dynamics

In recent years, the research on group movement has been drew pedestrian and evacuation dynamicists’ attention. In this paper, we explored to build a group model in a simple way. The group model considered two drift parameters, D and d. Thereinto, D expresses the destination’s attraction and d stands for group leader’s attraction and d is simplified to direct towards the group leader. Meantime, a method of generating groups is proposed. The simulation results show that with the increase of group size, the negative effect of group on crowd becomes greater. And group walking has more obvious effect on group owning large velocity. Besides the increase of group attraction intensity makes the negative effect distinct. In addition, it is found that with the increase of group disperse degree, the negative impact of group walking becomes obvious. What’s more, the effect of group disperse degree will not increase without limitation. The findings in this paper help researchers understand the impact of the presence of groups on crowd.