Visual information based social force model for crowd evacuation

Abstract

With the increase in large-scale incidents in real life, crowd evacuation plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety of human crowds during emergency situations. The behavior patterns of crowds are well rendered by existing crowd dynamics models. However, most related studies ignore the information perception of pedestrians. To overcome this issue, we develop a visual information based social force model to simulate the interpretable evacuation process from the perspective of visual perception. Numerical experiments indicate that the evacuation efficiency and decision-making ability promote rapidly within a small range with the increase in unbalanced prior knowledge. The propagation of acceleration behavior caused by emergencies is asymmetric due to the anisotropy of visual information. Therefore, this model effectively characterizes the effect of visual information on crowd evacuation and provides new insights into the information perception of individuals in complex scenarios.