A modified social force model for crowd evacuation considering collision predicting behaviors

Abstract

The social force model is one of the most common models used in the study of pedestrian dynamics. In the social force model, there are oscillation in the movement of pedestrians. To address the oscillation phenomenon, this paper modifies the way of setting psychological forces and judgment conditions based on previous research. By comparing the simulation results with the real experimental results, the evacuation time results are basically the same, which validates the effectiveness of the modified social force model. The simulation results show that the modified social force model eliminates the phenomenon of evacuee velocity oscillations near fixed obstacles in the original model and fixes the phenomenon of abnormal behavior of evacuees during collisions. In addition, we simulate different numbers of evacuees (i.e.,25,50,100,200) and the results show that the modified social force model successfully replicates the phenomenon of arch congestion during evacuation.