IoT-Based Positive Emotional Contagion for Crowd Evacuation

In emergency evacuations, crowds often become congested and stampeded because of extreme panic, resulting in injuries and fatalities. Safety officers can spread positive emotions and reduce crowd panic by issuing information or appeasement, which is an effective way to ensure evacuation safety. However, how to deploy safety officers appropriately and maximize positive emotional contagion to cover the largest number of chaotic individuals is still a challenging problem. To solve this problem, we propose an IoT-based positive emotional contagion (IoT-PEC) method for crowd evacuation. First, we employ IoT technologies to capture the attributes of crowd movement, such as position and velocity. Based on these attributes, the crowd chaos can be quantified by calculating the macroscopic and microscopic entropies. Second, we propose an entropy-based anisotropic emotional contagion model (E-AECM) to achieve the nonuniform positive emotional contagion considering the influence of chaos on the propagation rate. Third, we formulate the problem of safety officer placement as an optimization problem to maximize the positive emotional contagion on the chaos individuals. Finally, we implement a simulation system for crowd evacuation to visualize the results of positive emotion contagion. The proposed method can provide guidance for emergency response management.