Simulation of Crowd Egress with Environmental Stressors
This study addresses the challenge of modeling human responses to stressors during emergency evacuations in multi-compartment buildings. Methodologically, it introduces a novel social-force model framework integrating psychological stress theory—specifically embedding stress-response mechanisms systematically into macroscopic pedestrian dynamics for the first time—coupled with opinion dynamics to capture collective decision-making during pre-movement phases, and synergistically combining FDS+EVAC with the custom crowdEgress platform for multi-scale co-simulation. Its key contribution lies in establishing an interpretable, causal chain from environmental stress → individual stress response → emergent collective behavior, unifying bottleneck passage, herding decisions, and dynamic pathfinding within a single formalism. Experimental validation demonstrates high-fidelity reproduction and prediction of stress-induced phenomena—including evacuation delays, localized congestion amplification, and irrational clustering—as well as accurate reconstruction of real-world flow-rate distributions and route-choice preferences across benchmark scenarios.