Modeling of neurotic personality trait of pedestrians in panic situation

Pedestrian crowd simulation is an emerging field of study that simulates large number of pedestrian movement in different environmental conditions. In literature, several macroscopic and microscopic models are proposed to simulate pedestrian movement. However, for realistic pedestrian motion, the most widely used and highly cited microscopic model is the Social Force Model (SFM). This model has capability to simulate pedestrian motion in both normal and panic conditions. In literature, it is observed that the incorporation of personality traits in pedestrian models for crowd simulations is almost nonexistent. Whereas, it is believed that pedestrians' personality is a very crucial factor hence it should be modeled to simulate pedestrian's movement realistically. Personality computing is a vast domain, hence in the current study, one of the most relevant personality attribute of the Big Five personality traits known as `neuroticism' is incorporated in SFM. Exhaustive simulations of several experiments are performed and the results are reported. It is found that if personality trait of pedestrian's neurotic-ness within a crowd is diverse among each other than the evacuation behavior become complex and chaotic. On contrary, if crowd's neurotic diversity is less and crowd is more homogeneous than smooth patterns in the crowd evacuation time are observed. In literature, best evacuation time for SFM is reported for global panic value 0.4 but on incorporating pedestrian's neurotic-ness and performing exhaustive experiments with both homogeneous and heterogeneous crowds, best evacuation time is obtained on global panic value 0.3. This value indicates that on adoption of personality attribute in SFM, relatively more individualistic behavior provides better evacuation time than of herding behavior when compared with SFM.