Simulation of Small Social Group Behaviors in Emergency Evacuation

In this paper, we present a novel method to simulate the influences of small social group on pedestrian's behaviors under emergency situations. Our method is built on an important observation that the relationships between group members are usually different and even mutual relationships between group members might be asymmetric. Two phenomena can be produced by our method based on this observation. The first is group aggregation phenomenon which means that pedestrians tend to stay closer to their socially close group members than socially distant members. The second phenomenon is the complicated process of searching for lost members which is modeled as a cost-based function in our method. This function will guide pedestrians to make many decisions like whether to look for the lost members, who will be searched for, who will conduct the search as well as when to abort the search. The experimental results show that our method can produce very real social group behaviors under emergency situations.