Using SIR Model to Simulate Emotion Contagion in Dynamic Crowd Aggregation Process

Emotion contagion is an indispensable behavior in a dynamic crowd, especially in an evacuation situation. As a consequence, generating emotion contagion results is very useful in the crowd simulation field. However, because the topology of the crowd usually keeps changing dynamically, computing the contagion process is a challenge. In this paper, we represented our research about the emotion contagion effects on the virtual pedestrian dynamic aggregation process. First of all, we calculated individuals’ moving parameters based on their prefixed expectations according to the social force theory. After this, we made an adjacent test for each individual to generate nearer neighbors for further emotional contagions computing between neighbors. We then treated the emotional contagions between individuals and their neighbors as the information spreading process so that we can adopt the emotional information spreading model SIR (Susceptible Infective Removal) to calculate emotional influences, which are represented as their changing moving velocities during aggregation. Social force for computing low level moving parameters and SIR model for generating emotional influences were integrated by our method to simulate the dynamic pedestrian aggregation. Experimental results showed that the SIR model can effectively improve the fidelity of the emotional interaction process and crowd aggregation.