Simulation of the Emotion Dynamics in a Group of Agents in an Evacuation Situation

Abstract : Nowadays, more and more emergency evacuation simulations are used to evaluate the safety level of a building during an emergency evacuation after an accident. The heart of this kind of simulations is the simulation of human behavior because simulation results depend for a big part on how this behavior is simulated. However, human behaviors in a real emergency situation are determined by a lot of cognitive mechanisms. In order to make the simulation more realistic, plenty of factors (e.g. innate characteristics, perception of the environment, internal rules, personality and even emotions) that affect human behaviors must be taken into account. This paper focuses on the influence of emotions, and more precisely on the influence of their dynamics and propagation from an agent to another. The main contribution of this work is the development of a model of emotions taking into account their dynamics and their propagation and its integration in an evacuation simulation. The first results of the simulation show the benefits of considering emotion propagation.