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The social force model (SFM) can be applied to characterize pedestrian dynamics in normal scenarios. However, its model of interactions among pedestrians deviates from actual scenarios to some extent. Thus, we propose an improved SFM where pedestrians consider avoiding potential conflicts in advance during the walking process. Meanwhile, the response range of potential conflicts is related to the response time and relative velocity vector. Simulation results demonstrate that the conflict avoidance force plays an important role in guiding pedestrian dynamics. Conflict avoidance makes pedestrian trajectories smoother and more realistic. Moreover, for high pedestrian density (without congestion), moderate values of response time may exist, resulting in the minimum evacuation efficiency. We hope to provide some insights into how to better model interactions among pedestrians during normal evacuation.

The motion of pedestrian crowds can be described as if they are subject to "social forces". Grouping, as a common phenomenon in pedestrian behaviors, plays a decisive role in affecting evacuation efficiency. Here we propose two different group evacuation (GE) regimes, namely the leaderless GE and leadership GE, to explore the evacuation dynamics of groupstructured pedestrians. Simulation results show that elevating sizes or numbers of these groups can promote evacuation efficiency when individuals all try to move fast, in contrast to the case of small desired velocities. More importantly, with the same group size and group number, leadership GE outperforms leaderless GE, implying the positive effect of adopting appropriate community leaders. We hope that these observations could provide some insight into pedestrians' collective action during the evacuation process.

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