Abstract
Crowd behaviors consisted by the general public have a risk of panic, falling like dominoes in a disaster. Therefore crowd behaviors have been simulated for examination of a disaster plan and disaster prevention education. Psychological elements are considered as influencing a human behavior under a crowd. However it is difficult to build simulation model reflected individual characteristics because the number of conditions drastically increase.
Therefore the authors build the agent (decision-making entity) model that personality changes an agent feature of cognition, set of goal and behavior selection, and that anxiety limits processing resource of agent and it leads irrational behavior’s selection. We conducted personality test and questionnaire of evacuation behavior. The data were analyzed with covariance structure analysis for estimating the effect of human’s characteristics on the cognitive process and behavior selection.
To verify our suggestion, we built two simulation models. First one simulated evacuation behavior in an underground mall with some guides. We make this situation be similar to actual evacuation experiment. Second one simulated fire evacuation behavior in a building. Both of them showed the crowd behaviors such as herding and pushing. Moreover we observed the distribution of agents’ personality changed the crowd behavior in simulations, for example a group composed of high agreeableness agent didn’ t cause a pushing phenomenon and shorten total evacuation time. We would like to adapt this model for the system of crowd accident prediction and prevention planning (which deal with estimation of facility placement, disaster prevention education and so on) and to support building managers and clients to promote a greater understanding of crowd behavior on our future work.
