A Social Bonds Integration Approach for Crowd Panic Simulation

Abstract

Crowd panic has incurred massive injuries and deaths throughout history; thus understanding it is particularly important in order to save human lives. Recently, numerous simulation methods have been contributed in order to provide insight into the design of evacuation planning strategies. In this paper, we integrate a social structure to the crowd mobility model for the purpose of investigating the influence of social bonds on collective behavior during panic. A macroscopic crowd panic model based on social science theories was integrated as an internal module to the microscopic mobility model. The resulting framework is tunable and permits the implementation of several panic scenarios. It is also designed to run in different situations for a better comprehension of panic-related phenomena. The results demonstrate the smoothness of our crowd flow model and the realism of evacuation during panic.