Evacuation in the Social Force Model is not stationary

TL;DR

This study uses the Social Force Model to simulate evacuation dynamics, revealing that pedestrian flow is non-stationary with phases of clogging and laminar flow, analyzed through fluctuation techniques.

Contribution

It demonstrates that evacuation flow in the Social Force Model is non-stationary, with detailed analysis of flow fluctuations and clogging effects during evacuation.

Findings

Flow is non-stationary with clogging events slowing evacuation.

Flow becomes laminar as crowd decreases.

Fluctuation analysis reveals changing flow dynamics.

Abstract

An evacuation process is simulated within the Social Force Model. Thousand pedestrians are leaving a room by one exit. We investigate the stationarity of the distribution of time lags between instants when two successive pedestrians cross the exit. The exponential tail of the distribution is shown to gradually vanish. Taking fluctuations apart, the time lags decrease in time till there are only about 50 pedestrians in the room, then they start to increase. This suggests that at the last stage the flow is laminar. In the first stage, clogging events slow the evacuation down. As they are more likely for larger crowds, the flow is not stationary. The data are investigated with detrended fluctuation analysis.