An Extended Social Force Model via Pedestrian Heterogeneity Affecting the Self-Driven Force

As one of the most effective models for human collective motion, the social force model (SFM) simulates the dynamics of crowd evacuation from a microscopic perspective. However, it treats pedestrians as the homogeneous rigid particles, whereas pedestrians are diverse and heterogeneous in real life. Therefore, this paper develops a pedestrian heterogeneity-based social force model (PHSFM) by introducing physique and mentality coefficients into the SFM to quantify physiology and psychology attributes of pedestrians, respectively. These two coefficients can affect the self-driven force by changing the desired speed, thus characterizing the pedestrian heterogeneity more realistically. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the PHSFM designs a more general and accurate theoretical framework for the expression of pedestrian heterogeneity, which realizes special behavior patterns caused by individual diversity. Furthermore, our model provides effective guidelines for the management of crowds in potential research fields such as transportation, architectural science and safety science.