Modeling Herd Behavior Caused by Evacuation Decision Making Using Response Threshold

Abstract

Herd behavior is a cognitive bias in humans which is one of the causes of inappropriate or irrational behavior during evacuations. Although previous work in evacuation simulations have incorporated cognitive biases for realistic results, most of this work has focused on predefined rules or roles to implement these biases, leaving them unable to investigate the cause of herd behaviors. In this paper, an evacuation decision model based on the biological response threshold model is presented to reproduce human herd behaviors in evacuations. Since this model is independent of any predefined rules, it can be used for in-depth analysis of herding. Evacuation simulations using this model reveals that the uneven spatial distribution of evacuees causes an increase in the number of evacuees per unit time. It also shows that as the population density of the room increases, the number of evacuees per unit time increases rapidly.