Improved social force model considering the influence of COVID-19 pandemic: Pedestrian evacuation under regulation

Abstract

Collective behavior has been frequently studied in previous works. However, during pandemics, the method in which system dynamics control the collective behavior of pedestrians has rarely been studied. To further understand this issue, an improved social force model is proposed in this paper to explore the potential constraints caused by pandemics during pedestrian evacuations. During COVID-19, Regulatory authorities usually require pedestrians to keep a certain social distance from each other to avoid virus infection. Our model can characterize the feature that pedestrians are sensitive to surrounding pedestrians within this prescriptive social distance. Based on the simulated results in an ordinary room, the effects of prescriptive social distance, behavioral response times and other potential factors on evacuation efficiency are compared to reflect the changes caused by COVID-19. The main findings are as follows. (1) Trying to maintain a social distance of 1.5 m will not delay evacuations but instead promote overall process of evacuations. Under the appropriate desired speed, a win‒win situation between epidemic safety and evacuation efficiency can be achieved. (2) The increase in prescriptive social distance under a high desired speed will slightly promote evacuations. When the desired speed is too low, however, it may substantially reduce evacuation efficiency. (3) The response time reflects the epidemic sensitivity of pedestrians. For pedestrians in congestion, a high response time value indicates a longer social distance adjustment, which will have a certain inhibitory effect on evacuation efficiency. (4) The presence of epidemic-sensitive pedestrians can effectively inhibit the “faster-is-slower effect”. This work will help managers formulate relevant evacuation plans by taking advantage of the balance between personal purpose of fast evacuation and the public regulations, thereby inhibiting the spread of COVID-19 without lowing evacuation efficiency.