The impact of culture on crowd dynamics: an empirical approach

In agent-based social simulation, crowd models are used to generate agent behaviors that should correspond closely to human crowds. Despite significant progress in this area, many existing crowd models do not yet account for important cultural factors in crowd behavior, and even more so, for mixed-culture crowds. Moreover, evaluation of crowd models accounting for culture is particularly difficult, e.g., as controlled experiments are more difficult to set up, due to lack of subjects from different cultures. In this paper we examine the impact of cultural differences on crowd dynamics in pedestrian and evacuation domains. We account for micro-level cultural attributes: personal spaces, speed, pedestrian avoidance side and group formations. We then quantitatively validate the macro-level predictions of an agent-based simulation utilizing these against data from web-cam movies of human pedestrian crowds recorded in five different countries: Iraq, Israel, England, Canada and France. Using the validated simulations, we investigate the impact of each micro-level attribute on the resulting macro level behavior. We also examine the impact of mixed cultures on macro-level behavior. In the evacuation domain, we use an established simulation system to investigate cultural differences reported in the literature, and additionally explore the resulting macro level behavior.