Early detection of herding behaviour during emergency evacuations

Abstract

© David Amores, Maria Vasardani, and Egemen Tanin. Social scientists have observed a number of irrational behaviours during emergency evacuations, caused by a range of possible cognitive biases. One such behaviour is herding - people following and trusting others to guide them, when they do not know where the nearest exit is. This behaviour may lead to safety under a knowledgeable leader, but can also lead to dead-ends. We present a method for the automatic early detection of herding behaviour to avoid suboptimal evacuations. The method comprises three steps: (i) people clusters identification during evacuation, (ii) collection of clusters' spatio-temporal information to extract features for..