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7140694 
Journal Article 
Personality trait and group emotion contagion based crowd simulation for emergency evacuation 
Mao, Yan; Yang, S; Li, Z; Li, Y; , 
2020 
1 
Multimedia Tools and Applications
ISSN: 1380-7501 
SPRINGER 
DORDRECHT 
3077-3104 
WOS:000519410700002 
Most of current crowd simulation methods have considered the impact of interindividual emotion on the agent's behavior pattern during emergency evacuations. However, the emotion contagion is not only at the individual level, but also at the contagion in groups. Psychological researches show that the third-party authority also has an impact on emotion contagion. For example, security guards can guide individuals to find exits and calms them; and teachers can lead their students safely evacuate from multi-layer teaching buildings, etc. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to simulate the emergency evacuations in virtual environment. This framework considers four kinds of agents: third-party authority agents, group leaders, members and isolated agents. Firstly, we randomly assign each agent a specific personality and initialize its emotion. Secondly, the emotion contagion in this paper is considered with three aspects: intra-group contagion, inter-group contagion and third-party authority based emotion contagion. We simulate inter-group aggregated behaviors by improving the ASCRIBE and provide a threshold model to simulate inter-group switching behaviors. The third-party authorities exhibit a calm effect on the agents during an evacuation, and we set their negative emotion very low and keep unchanged. Meanwhile, we perform high-level path planning to explore the environments and obtain a cognitive map for navigation purposes. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, simulation results demonstrate that our proposed model can simulate the emotion contagion in groups during emergency evacuations, and our model outperforms some existing works.