Modeling Group Structures With Emotion in Crowd Evacuation

Simulation on crowd evacuation has attracted plenty of attention in the past few years. Emotion plays a significant role in human decision making processes and on the behaviors during the evacuation. Moreover, grouping is a common phenomenon in crowds, and there are a lot of roles included in a group. In this paper, we present a unified framework to model the structure aspect of the groups with emotion for a crowd suffering fires and explosions in public areas. The proposed evacuation framework consists of two components: (1) an emotion model for various roles in the case of an emergency. Emotional changing is a complex process where different roles are influenced by different factors. (2) Both intra-group structure and inter-group relationship are considered to simulate the herd phenomenon in emergency. The structure and behaviors of a group are related to the emotions of different roles. A follower can decide whether to leave the group or not according to the emotion of the group leader and the one of his own, thus the members of the group may always dynamically change. Simulation results show that the developed framework can practically model the emotion changing and different group structures of evacuation crowds.