Simulation of crowd behavior using Fuzzy Social Force Model

Social Force Model (SFM) uses mathematical equations to describe pedestrians intentions and interactions. The crowd behavior is a result of these forces acting in each pedestrian. One of the major disadvantages of SFM is the understanding of the pedestrians intentions that are somewhat hidden in the mathematical equations and its parameters. In this paper we propose the implementation of a fuzzy logic based model called Fuzzy Social Force Model, capable to model and simulate crowd behavior. The proposed model translate the forces modeled by SFM equations into desire and interaction effects described by linguistic expression rules and fuzzy sets. This novel model is easier to parameterize, to extend and it presents the same emerging behaviors of the SFM but with a better interpretability. Our approach also offers a natural way to adjust and modify the pedestrians dynamics for panic, low visibility or other specific situations.