Improved Crowd Dynamics Analysis Considering Physical Contact Force and Panic Emotional Propagation

Panic behaviors in a pedestrian flow often lead to a state of chaos or disorder among the pedestrian crowd, resulting in a crowd accident with high possibility. To investigate the panic pedestrian dynamics and further prevent serious crowd accidents, simulation based on dynamics modeling and accident video data is a popular solution to date. Thereby, it is challenging but significant to improve the crowd dynamics model more consistent with the ground truth of real pedestrian movement scenarios, with consideration of both physical contact force and panic emotional propagation in a crowd. Therefore, this study proposed an extended social force model (ESFM) by applying the physical contact-force estimation during pedestrian collision based on non-smooth contact dynamics. Subsequently, the ESFM was integrated with an improved panic propagation model (IPPM) considering obstacle and promotion factors. Finally, taking the crowd panic accident happened in Nepal in 2015 as an experiment case, the simulation of panic crowd dynamics was conducted within Anylogic software. Four cases of SFM, ESFM, SFM+IPPM, and ESFM+IPPM were compared quantitatively and graphically. The experimental results showed that the pedestrian distribution obtained from the proposed ESFM+IPPM was the closest to the ground truth during the panic response period, with 28.8% lower of Hausdorff distance than the original SFM, and 21.6% lower the well-known BHSFM, respectively. This approach can help improve the panic crowd modeling and pedestrian distribution prediction in real scenarios.