Urban disaster simulation incorporating human psychological models in evacuation behaviors

Abstract

Building evacuation simulation provides us with various knowledge and suggestion before a real disaster happens. To date, however, evacuees were often modeled as homogeneous without individual motivation in a large-scale urban simulation model, which is rather different from real human behavior. In this paper, an evacuation simulation model with human psychological models is developed for urban disaster situation. Three psychological models are actually incorporated: normalcy bias, emotional contagion bias, and sympathy behavior bias. Normalcy bias is the initial evacuation delay caused by a belief that abnormal events rarely happen. Emotional contagion is the effect of one person’s emotional state on the emotional state of people around him/her both explicitly and implicitly. Simulated experimental results show that the proposed model provides accurate evacuation behaviors than the normal behavior model without psychological consideration.