Title: Empirical study on social groups in pedestrian evacuation dynamics,
Abstract: Pedestrian crowds often include social groups, i.e. pedestrians that walk
together because of social relationships. They show characteristic
configurations and influence the dynamics of the entire crowd. In order to
investigate the impact of social groups on evacuations we performed an
empirical study with pupils. Several evacuation runs with groups of different
sizes and different interactions were performed. New group parameters are
introduced which allow to describe the dynamics of the groups and the
configuration of the group members quantitatively. The analysis shows a
possible decrease of evacuation times for large groups due to self-ordering
effects. Social groups can be approximated as ellipses that orientate along
their direction of motion. Furthermore, explicitly cooperative behaviour among
group members leads to a stronger aggregation of group members and an
intermittent way of evacuation.