Dynamic leader role modeling for self‐organizing crowd evacuation simulation

Abstract The role of the leader in the self‐organizing crowd has a significant influence on the crowd evacuation when an emergency occurs. However, current crowd evacuation models either ignore the leadership characteristics of pedestrians or predefine an invariable leader identity. This article clearly distinguishes leaders from followers in a crowd and evaluates the impact of the leader's role on crowd evacuation under dynamic situations. First, the leadership model of the pedestrian is built based on the classic OCEAN personality parameters. Social dominance tendency is measured for more credibility. Then, the dynamic leader role model (DLRM) is proposed to describe the relationship between leaders and followers, considering the interaction among pedestrians during the evacuation. Finally, a novel crowd simulation algorithm based on the above DLRM is presented using the extended social force model. Various experiments in several typical scenarios verified that our proposed simulation model has better realism.