Simulation of Crowd Egress with Environmental Stressors

This article introduces a modeling framework to characterize evacuee response to environmental stimuli during emergency egress. The model is developed in consistency with stress theory, which explains how an organism reacts to environmental stressors (e.g., alarm signals or hazardous factors such as smoke and fire). We integrate the theory into the well-known social force model, and develop a framework to simulate crowd evacuation behavior in multi-compartment layout in buildings. Our method serves as a theoretical basis to study crowd movement at bottlenecks, and simulate their herding behavior and way-finding activities in normal and hazardous conditions. The pre-movement behavior is also briefly investigated by using opinion dynamics with a social group model. The algorithms have been partly tested in FDS+EVAC as well as our simulation platform crowdEgress.