Modeling and Simulation of the Effects of Social Relation and Emotion on Decision Making in Emergency Evacuation

Abstract

Applying agent-based modeling to simulate the evacuation in case of emergency situations is recognized by many research works as an efficient tool for understanding the behavior and decision making of occupants in these situations. In this paper, we present our work aiming to modeling the influence of the emotion and social relationship of occupants on their behaviors and decision making in emergency as in case of fire disaster. Firstly, we proposed a formalization of occupants' behavior at group level in emergency situations based on the social theory. This formalization details possible behaviors and actions of people in emergency evacuations, taking into account occupant's social relationship. The formalization will facilitate the construction of simulation for emergency evacuation. Secondly, we modeled the influence of emotion and group behavior on the decision making of occupants in crisis situations. Thirdly, we developed an agent-based simulation that took into account the effect of group and emotion on the decision making of occupants in emergency situations. We conducted a set of experiments allowing to observe and analyze the behavior of people in emergency evacuation.