The walking behaviour of pedestrian social groups and its impact on crowd dynamics

Understand

Human crowd motion is mainly driven by self-organized processes based on local interactions among pedestrians.

• While most studies of crowd behavior consider only interactions among isolated individuals, it turns out that up to 70% of people in a crowd are actually moving in groups, such as friends, couples, or families walking together.
• These groups constitute medium-scale aggregated structures and their impact on crowd dynamics is still largely unknown.
• In this work, we analyze the motion of approximately 1500 pedestrian groups under natural condition, and show that social interactions among group members generate typical group walking patterns that influence crowd dynamics.