Modified social force model considering emotional contagion for crowd evacuation simulation

Abstract

Pedestrian behavior in emergency situations is an important part of emergency management, and crowd evacuation simulation provides a low-cost and low-risk method for investigating pedestrian evacuation dynamics by describing pedestrian evacuation behavior and predicting evacuation outcomes under hypothetical situations. This study proposed a modified social force model that combines dynamic hazard and emotional contagion frameworks to investigate the effect of panic on pedestrian evacuation dynamics under heterogeneous personality trait distributions. First, the emotional contagion framework was improved, and an updated emotional model was developed considering personality characteristics. Second, the individual self-driving force in the social force model was transformed from a physical drive mode to a psychological drive mode by introducing panic factors. Lastly, new rules for the spread of panic within small groups were formulated based on the important influence of small group behavior on evacuation. The simulation results confirmed the feasibility of analyzing crowd evacuation from the perspective of social psychology, and revealed that the spread of panic was closely related to the distribution of personality characteristics, individual walking speed, exit usage, evacuation efficiency, and small groups. In addition, the model could reproduce self-organizing behavior in crowd evacuation, such as fast is slow and herd behavior. Further, the results revealed that moderate panic can help improve evacuation efficiency, whereas excessive panic can result in uneven utilization of exits. In addition, the presence of small groups in panic crowds increased the crowd evacuation time.