  In shared space environments, urban space is shared among different types of
road users, who frequently interact with each other to negotiate priority and
coordinate their trajectories. Instead of traffic rules, interactions among
them are conducted by informal rules like speed limitations and by social
protocols e.g., courtesy behavior. Social groups (socially related road users
who walk together) are an essential phenomenon in shared spaces and affect the
safety and efficiency of such environments. To replicate group phenomena and
systematically study their influence in shared spaces; realistic models of
social groups and the integration of these models into shared space simulations
are required. In this work, we focus on pedestrian groups and adopt an extended
version of the social force model in conjunction with a game-theoretic model to
simulate their movements. The novelty of our paper is in the modeling of
interactions between social groups and vehicles. We validate our model by
simulating scenarios involving interaction between social groups and also
group-to-vehicle interaction.
