Evacuation Simulation through Formal Emotional Agent based Modelling

Abstract

Evacuation Simulation is recognised as an important tool for assessing design choices for urban areas. Although a number of approaches have been introduced, it is widely acceptable that such simulation scenarios demand modelling of emotional aspects of evacuees, and how these affect their behaviour. The present work, proposes that formal agent modelling based on e X-machines can rigorously define but also naturally lead to realistic simulations of such scenarios. e X-machines can model agent behaviour influenced by emotions, including social aspects of emotions, such as emotion contagion. The developed formal model is refined to simulation code, that is able to visualise and simulate crowd believable behaviour.

Emotion contagion in agent-based simulations of crowds: a systematic review

“…They conclude that this pattern is consistent with the experimental data that found both the convergence in emotion and persistent individual variation. Sakellariou et al [77] also propose a simplified version of the contagion mechanism in ASCRIBE without amplification and combine this with a finite state machine. Change in emotion due to contagion is determined by the average absorption, namely the difference in emotion between agents weighted by their contagion strength.…”

“…In [78] Sakellariou et al extended the model of [77] with a two dimensional representation of emotion. The emotional state of an agent consists of a valence and arousal dimension (range -1 to 1) that form emotional space in which the emotional state of an agent can be represented as a single point location.…”