Improved Social Force Model for Emergency Evacuation Scene with Limited Field of Vision

Abstract

Pedestrian movement modeling and simulation is an important way to formulate an emergency evacuation plan. The performance of the pedestrian movement model directly determines the accuracy of the simulation experiment results. Pedestrian movement in the real world is a very complicated process, and this process is susceptible to a variety of external factors (e.g. road conditions, visibility, etc.) and internal factors (e.g. psychological states, etc.) which making it difficult to model pedestrian movement. The social force model draws on the principles of mechanics and proposes a modeling scheme from the perspective of social force which greatly simplifies the process of pedestrian movement modeling. However, the traditional social force model considers the general situation of pedestrian movement and does not target the emergency evacuation scene, which has certain limitations. In this paper we start with the social force model and introduces the concepts of external guides and internal panic emotions to improves the model. In the scene, the influence of the attraction of the guide and the psychological state of the pedestrian on the movement process of the pedestrian are considered. So that the model is more suitable for the emergency evacuation scene with limited field of vision. It also provides a reference for emergency evacuation plans in public places. We take the subway station as the research object and uses Anylogic software to build simulation experiments. The experimental results show that the improved model we proposed in this paper is less than the traditional model in terms of evacuation time by 8.4%, and is better than the traditional model in terms of exit pedestrian density by 21.5%.

Limited visual range in the Social Force Model: Effects on macroscopic and microscopic dynamics

“…One of the most popular studies performed with either the SFM or its modified versions is the simulation of crowd evacuations. Researchers have studied the characteristics of pedestrian evacuations in virtual geometries with a single exit [6,7] or multiple exits [8,9,10] and in real subway geometries [11,12,13]. Despite the large number of computational studies in the SFM, researchers have scarcely utilized two of the most critical macroscopic empirical results, i.e., bottleneck flows (BF) and the speed-density fundamental diagram (FD), in validating the models.…”