Modeling social groups in crowds using Common Ground Theory

Abstract

Social interaction and group coordination are important factors in the simulation of human crowd behavior. To date, few simulation methods have been informed by models of human group behavior from the social science studies. In this paper we advance a computational model informed by Common Ground (CG) Theory that both inherits the social realism provided by the CG model and is computationally tractable for a large number of groups and individuals. The task of navigation in a group is viewed as performing a joint activity among agents, which requires effective coordination among group members. Our model includes both macro and micro coordination, addressing the joint plans, and the actions for coordination respectively. These coordination activities and plans inform the high-level route and walking strategies of the agents. We demonstrate a series of studies to show the qualitative and quantitative differences in simulation results with and without incorporation of the CG model.

Adding sociality to virtual pedestrian groups

“…[van den Berg et al 2009]. [Park et al 2012] presented a model that considers higher-level social interactions between the group members. It assigns a leader to each group, and it handles group-coordination strategies based on common ground theory.…”

Simulating and animating social dynamics: embedding small pedestrian groups in crowds

“…In group activities, people perform actions such as body movements, gestures, and eye gazes as means of participating with others in the group, whereas crowd simulation applications that consider group organization typically focus on overall formations and inter‐member distances; Park et al . showed that communicative behavior within individual groups can impact the distribution of the simulated crowd as a whole . Applying Herbert Clark's common ground (CG) theory to model group behaviors in simulation, they demonstrated the impact of incorporation of their model on the dynamic congestion distribution in simulations but did not show that the model produced more correct or believable simulations.…”

Modeling Agent Social Joint Actions via Micro and Macro Coordination Strategies

“…In our previous work [5], we introduced the CG model and showed how each agent's high-level choices on the route and walking strategies are affected by the group coordination. In this paper, we extend the CG model and operationalize it for multi-agent coordination.…”