miSFM: On combination of Mutual Information and Social Force Model towards simulating crowd evacuation

In this paper we propose a novel technique termed miSFM for the simulation of crowd evacuation. miSFM take merits of both Mutual Information (MI) and Social Force Model (SFM). More specifically, MI of interacting agents is adopted to determine the level of order within a crowd during an evacuation. In such a way, SFM can be improved by adapting the forces involved at microscopic level between mutually interacting agents. The key innovation lies in highlighting how the dynamic adjustment of SFM parameters reveals much more realistic crowd movements for the evacuation simulation. Extensive experiments over several alternative and state-of-the-art works demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.