An emotional contagion based simulation for emergency evacuation peer behavior decision

Abstract

Simulating emergency evacuation plays an important role in social security. Most of the existing systems focus on modeling single type of crowd movements, while ignoring the impact of psychological factors on the population. This paper proposes an emotional contagion-based model to simulate the peer decision-making in emergency evacuation. Firstly, the peer behaviors are simulated by integrating emotion contagion and intimacy-based decision-making. Secondly, the intimacy coefficient is introduced into emotion contagion by mapping the PAD sentiment model and OCC emotion recognition model. Thirdly, based on the environmental familiarity, individuals who are familiar with the environment have a higher probability to find their peers. Finally, they will decide whether to make a peer decision based on the difficulty of the searching task, the ability to find the peers, etc. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, experimental results show that the proposed system can simulate the peer behaviors during emergency evacuation.