HAPC Model of Crowd Behavior during Crises

Abstract

The dynamics of pedestrian crowds during exceptional tragic events are very complex depending on a series of human behaviors resulting from combinations of basic interaction principles and self-organization. The Alert–Panic–Control (APC) model is one of the mathematical models in the literature for representing such complicated processes, mainly focusing on psychologists’ points of view (i.e., emotion contagion). This work proposes a Hybrid APC (HAPC) model including new processes, such as the effect of resonance, the victims caused by people in state of panic, new interactions between populations based on imitation and emotional contagion phenomena and the ability to simulate multiple disaster situations. Results from simulated scenarios showed that in the first 5 min 54.45% of population move towards a state of alert, 13.82% enter the control state and 31.73% pass to the state of panic, highlighting that individuals respond to a terrible incident very quickly, right away after it occurs.

Keywords

• natural disaster
• crowd dynamics
• mathematical modeling