Social Force Model-Based Group Behavior Simulation in Virtual Geographic Environments

Wenhang Li,Jun Sun,Tao Xu,Shen Shen,Lin Huang,Jianming Liang,Quanlong Feng,Dong Zhang,Jianhua Gong

doi:10.3390/ijgi7020079

Abstract

Virtual geographic environments (VGEs) are extensively used to explore the relationship between humans and environments. Crowd simulation provides a method for VGEs to represent crowd behaviors that are observed in the real world. The social force model (SFM) can simulate interactions among individuals, but it has not sufficiently accounted for inter-group and intra-group behaviors which are important components of crowd dynamics. We present the social group force model (SGFM), based on an extended SFM, to simulate group behaviors in VGEs with focuses on the avoiding behaviors among different social groups and the coordinate behaviors among subgroups that belong to one social group. In our model, psychological repulsions between social groups make them avoid with the whole group and group members can stick together as much as possible; while social groups are separated into several subgroups, the rear subgroups try to catch up and keep the whole group cohesive. We compare the simulation results of the SGFM with the extended SFM and the phenomena in videos. Then we discuss the function of Virtual Reality (VR) in crowd simulation visualization. The results indicate that the SGFM can enhance social group behaviors in crowd dynamics.

Highlights

Virtual geographic environments (VGEs) [1,2,3,4] are commonly used to explore dynamic geographic phenomena and processes
This paper aims to implement group dynamics in social force model (SFM) with focuses on the avoiding behaviors among different social groups and the coordinate behaviors among subgroups that belong to one social group
We introduce a case study to observe social group behaviors to prepare for qualitative comparison with the simulation results of the social group force model (SGFM); we do multiple experiments in different VGEs and discuss the selection of model parameters to refine the SGFM; we compare the the distance is too small, and fsubDist becomes a repulsive force

Summary

Introduction

Virtual geographic environments (VGEs) [1,2,3,4] are commonly used to explore dynamic geographic phenomena and processes. Investigation of the interactions between humans and the environment by simulating crowd behaviors in virtual geographic environments (VGEs) is significant in building design, infrastructure planning and emergency evacuation in geographic information system (GIS) [5,6,7,8,9]. Michael Schultz analyzed data on bridges, where participants had to use an underpass to gain access to an event, and discovered that only 14% of pedestrians are individuals [24] These data corroborate the importance of social groups. The social relations and social interactions among group members have great influence on crowd dynamics [10,15,37,38,39]. Realism in crowd simulation can be enhanced when aggregation and coordination are organized in social groups

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Results