Authors:
Lu Tan
and
Hui Lin
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Keyword(s):
Agent-based Modelling, Building Evacuation, Social Force, Stress, Emotional Contagion.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agent Models and Architectures
;
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Methodologies and Technologies
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Operational Research
;
Simulation
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
This paper presents an agent-based model focusing on occupant’s locomotion under stress, so as to study the impact of psychic stress on evacuation efficiency. In our model, the occupant’s stress is determined by factors including the moving velocity and distance to the exit, the psychological feature of stress resistance capability, and emotional contagion. The occupant’s evacuation behaviour in a stressful psychological state is attained as an emergent function of stress-related desire intensity and interaction force based on the Helbing social force model. Through a series of simulations using the proposed model, it is concluded that the increase in the occupants’ stress level does reduce the evacuation efficiency; the emotional contagion performs either a panic effect or a calm-down effect which affects the evacuation efficiency negatively or positively; intensive emotional contagion will significantly affect the occupant’s stress level and lead to remarkable variation in evacuati
on time; population structure has an influence on the evacuation efficiency in respect to the occupant’s capability of stress resistance. The conclusions indicate that proper control of psychic stress during emergency evacuation is critical for improving evacuation efficiency.
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