# A re-examination of the role of friction in the original Social Force Model

## TL;DR

This paper revisits the Social Force Model for pedestrian dynamics, demonstrating that modifying the friction coefficient improves its alignment with empirical flow-density data, especially under high-density conditions.

## Contribution

It introduces a simple modification to the friction term in the Social Force Model, enhancing its ability to replicate empirical fundamental diagrams of pedestrian flow.

## Key findings

- Modified friction coefficient improves model accuracy at high densities
- Speed profiles exhibit universal behavior across corridor sizes
- Clustering structures are affected by friction adjustments

## Abstract

The fundamental diagram of pedestrian dynamics gives the relation between the density and the flow within a specific enclosure. It is characterized by two distinctive behaviors: the free-flow regime (for low densities) and the congested regime (for high densities). In the former, the flow is an increasing function of the density, while in the latter, the flow remains on hold or decreases. In this work, we perform numerical simulations of the pilgrimage at the entrance of the Jamaraat bridge (pedestrians walking along a straight corridor) and compare flow-density measurements with empirical measurements made by Helbing[1]. We show that under high density conditions, the basic Social Force Model (SFM) does not completely handle the fundamental diagram reported in empirical measurements. We use analytical techniques and numerical simulations to prove that with an appropriate modification of the friction coefficient (but sustaining the SFM) it is possible to attain behaviors which are in qualitative agreement with the empirical data. Other authors have already proposed a modification of the relaxation time in order to address this problem. In this work, we unveil the fact that our approach is analogous to theirs since both affect the same term of the reduced-in-units equation of motion. We show how the friction modification affects the pedestrian clustering structures throughout the transition from the free-flow regime to the congested regime. We also show that the speed profile, normalized by width and maximum velocity yields a universal behavior regardless of the corridor dimensions.