Heterogeneous crowd dynamics considering the impact of personality traits under a fire emergency: A questionnaire & simulation-based approach

Abstract

The evacuation considering the personnel heterogeneity has yet to be thoroughly studied. Hence, heterogeneous crowd evacuation involving the impact of pedestrian’s personality traits on panic is probed by an extended floor field (FF) model in this paper. First, the personality traits are investigated by considering the OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) personality traits and the panic emotion is explored through a questionnaire-based experiment. Then, based on statistical results of questionnaires, an extended FF model is established to study the heterogeneous crowd dynamics under a fire scenario. The effect of neuroticism parameter φN, the fire origin position schemes and the differences between the normal walk and the fire evacuation were majorly discussed. Results demonstrate that the panic of pedestrians is highly correlated with the neuroticism parameter φN. Neuroticism personality trait has a major influence on the crowd evacuation process. With more remarkable neuroticism, pedestrians make decisions more emotionally and tend to evacuate more blindly. In addition, the fire origin position significantly affects the panic evacuation process. When a fire origin is closer to the exit, the evacuation time lengthens. Furthermore, modest panic urges the evacuation process, leading to an accelerated movement of pedestrians. Hence, it makes the evacuation time of a fire hitting case shorter than that of a normal walking one. The study contributes to understanding the influence of the personality heterogeneity on the evacuation and to developing some guidance to design the building structure, which are valuable for crowd management.