Simulating evacuation crowd with emotion and personality

As the number of emergencies continues to increase, technologies about crowd evacuation simulation in emergencies have attracted widespread attention. Virtual simulation technology can deduce the behavior of the crowd in emergencies and can be an intuitive tool for defining contingency plans. In emergencies, the crowd will be in a state of panic. The emotional contagion will easily lead to the crowd congestion and cause the accident. However, the influences of the emotional contagion are not well considered in the existing studies. This paper proposes a model of emotional contagion. It simulates the crowd evacuation behaviors in a fire scenario in supermarket to verify the influence of the emotional contagion. Experimental results show that emotional contagion may facilitate the spread of information among the crowd. Appropriate emotional contagion can speed up the evacuation of the crowd, but congestion may happen if the panic emotion spread too fast. This study can provide a new method to analyze crowd evacuation in emergencies.