Modeling Groups of Pedestrians in Least Effort Crowd Movements Using Cellular Automata

Groups of pedestrians like family members and friends normally move slower than others and therefore act as a virtual barrier and slow down the crowd. In this paper we present our variation of least effort cellular automata algorithm which also considers the effect of pedestrian groups on crowd movement. The algorithm has been used in small scale movement layer of our multi-agent crowd simulation platform in order to allow more realistic simulations of crowd flows. A simple walkway scenario has been used to test the outcome of the model. Preliminary results of the simulation of the effect of groups are reported in this paper.