Improved Social Force Models Considering Heterogeneous Characteristics among Social Groups

Social groups with heterogeneous characteristics are very common and have obvious effects on pedestrian movements. However, a limited number of models investigated the relationship of social groups with heterogeneous characteristics on the people movements. Based on several controlled experiments which took the social-groups with heterogeneous characteristics in terms of family-group and friend-group as the research objectives, the heterogeneous groups are characterized by different group size, velocity, interpersonal distance, step frequency, and walking pattern. The results showed that heterogeneous groups do have effects on pedestrian movements and the effect degrees vary with the heterogeneous attributes of groups. This paper filled the gap by developing an improved social force model which take in account the movement characteristics of groups and its influence on the pedestrians.