A Modified Social Force Evacuation Model for Heterogeneous Evacuees Under Fire Threat with Multiple Stress Factors

Abstract

For life-threatening events, such as fire hazards, performing real experiments (human-based experiments) to investigate the movement dynamics of occupants is often impractical due to different ethical, safety, and cost constraints. Consequently, realistic crowd movement models are essential for analyzing evacuation behavior. In this work, a modified social force model is proposed to simulate more reasonable movement patterns and prevent the unrealistic behavior of directly moving to and getting close to a fire source. The proposed model considers changes in stress levels caused by exposure to fire and incorporates their effects on escape behavior. Unlike most previous work, the non-homogeneity of occupants’ characteristics and physical abilities are considered. Simulation results show that the proposed model can provide more reasonable movement trajectories to avoid fire sources during emergency evacuation. Furthermore, the impacts of the location of the fire and the width of the exit on the performance of the evacuation process are investigated.