A Personality-based Model of Emotional Contagion and Control in Crowd Queuing Simulations

Queuing is a frequent daily activity. However, long waiting lines equate to frustration and potential safety hazards. We present a novel, personality-based model of emotional contagion and control for simulating crowd queuing. Our model integrates the influence of individual personalities and interpersonal relationships. Through the interaction between the agents and the external environment parameters, the emotional contagion model based on well-known theories in psychology is used to complete the agents’ behavior planning and path planning function. We combine the epidemiological SIR model with the cellular automaton model to capture various emotional modelling for multi-agent simulations. The overall formulation involves different emotional parameters, such as patience, urgency, and friendliness, closely related to crowd queuing. In addition, to manage the order of the queue, governing agents are added to prevent the emotional outbreak. We perform qualitative and quantitative comparisons between our simulation results and real-world observations on various scenarios. Numerous experiments show that reasonably increasing the queue channel and adding governing agents can effectively improve the quality of queues.