Recurrent emotional contagion for the crowd evacuation of a cyber-physical society

Abstract In recent years, emotional contagion has drawn great attention in the field of public security since it often leads to stampedes and crushes during large-scale emergencies. To date, there have been many studies on emotional contagion in both cyberspace and physical space, bringing a strong impetus to the simulation of crowd evacuation in emergencies. However, due to the heterogeneity of crowds in cyberspace and physical space, emotional contagion is rarely comprehensively considered in the cyber-physical society (CPS). In addition, the characteristics of emotional recurrence prone to appear in large-scale evacuation have not yet been fully elucidated. Therefore, the existing models cannot accurately describe the real situation of emotional contagion since there is a wide deviation between it and the reality. To solve this problem, we propose a recurrent emotional contagion (REC) method for crowd evacuation of the CPS. First, we construct a CPS-oriented REC model by considering the influence of emotional recurrence on the emotional contagion process. Second, we build the degree-based Mean-Field Equations to describe the dynamic evolution of the number of individuals while considering the heterogeneity of crowds. Furthermore, we use the Finite Difference Method to derive the numerical solution. Third, we construct recurrent small-world networks, which constitute a special case of CPS-REC, to verify the effectiveness of our model. Finally, we implement a crowd simulation system based on the CPS-REC model to visualize the results of our theoretical analysis. The experimental results show that our method can more realistically simulate the emotional contagion process.