A Modified Social Force Model under Different Psychological Conditions for Room Evacuation

In this paper, a modified version of the existing social force model is proposed to simulate an evacuation procedure in a classroom with different psychological conditions. Based on the numerous studies on the implementation of social force model in modeling evacuation motions, it is notable that most of the published studies do not take into account the pedestrians' psychology in their models. To reflect the effects of different psychological conditions, we develop a modified social force model, incorporating a stop mechanism with variable distance, which is related with the psychological factor of pedestrians. Simulation experiment is presented for validating the proposed model. At the same time, the phenomenon that more anxiety causes more clogging is also observed in the simulation. The improvement in our proposed model is valuable for further study and for upgrading the safety aspects of building designs.