Fuzzy Social Force Model

Abstract

Social Force Model (SFM) uses mathematical equations to describe pedestrians intentions and interactions. The crowd behavior emerges as the result of these forces acting in each pedestrian. One of the major disadvantages of the SFM is the understanding of the pedestrians intentions that is somewhat hidden in the mathematical equations and its parameters. In this paper we propose the implementation of a fuzzy logic based model called Fuzzy Social Force Model, capable to model and simulate crowd behavior. The proposed model translate the forces modeled by SFM equations into desire and interaction effects described by linguistic expression rules and fuzzy sets. This novel model is easier to parameterize and to extend and it presents the same emerging behaviors of the SFM but with a better interpretability. Our approach also offers a natural way to adjust and modify the pedestrian dynamics for panic, low visibility or other specific situations.