Improved Social Force Model based on Navigation Points for Crowd Emergent Evacuation

Crowd evacuation simulation is an important research issue for designing reasonable building layouts and planning more effective evacuation routes. The social force model (SFM) is an important pedestrian movement model, and is widely used in crowd evacuation simulations. The model can effectively simulate crowd evacuation behaviors in a simple scene, but for a multi-obstacle scene, the model could result in some undesirable problems, such as pedestrian evacuation trajectory oscillation, pedestrian stagnation and poor evacuation routing. This paper analyzes the causes of these problems and proposes an improved SFM for complex multi-obstacle scenes. The new model adds navigation points and walking shortest route principles to the SFM. Based on the proposed model, a crowd evacuation simulation system is developed, and the crowd evacuation simulation was carried out in various scenes, including some with simple obstacles, as well as those with multi-obstacles. Experiments show that the pedestrians in the proposed model can effectively bypass obstacles and plan reasonable evacuation routes.