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.

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Crowd simulation is used for evacuation and crowd safety inspections, study of performance in crowd systems and animations. Cellular automata has been extensively used in modelling the crowd. In regular cellular automata models, each pedestrian occupies a single cell with the size of a pedestrian body. Since the space is divided into relatively large cells, the movements of pedestrians look like the movements of pieces on a chess board. Furthermore, all pedestrians have the same body size and speed. In this paper, a method called fine grid cellular automata is proposed in which smaller cells are used and pedestrian body may occupy several cells. The model allows the use of different body sizes, shapes and speeds for pedestrian.The proposed model is used for simulating movements of pedestrians toward a target. A typical walkway scenario is used to test and evaluate the model. The movements of pedestrians are smoother because of the finer grain discretization of movements and the simulation results match empirical speed-density graphs with good accuracy.

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