A Cognition-Emotion-Personality Framework for Modeling Human-Like Awareness and Behavior in Emergency Evacuations

Zoi Lygizou, Michalis Zervas, Helena G. Theodoropoulou, Vasilis Zafeiropoulos, Dimitris Kalles, Chairi Kiourt

Agent-based evacuation simulations are widely used to study crowd behavior during emergencies, but many models rely on assumptions such as perfect event awareness, complete exit knowledge, and fully rational decision-making. This paper presents an extended evacuation framework that integrates cognitive, emotional, social, and personality-related mechanisms into a unified model of human behavior under uncertainty. The framework incorporates a dynamic event-awareness mechanism based on a continuous Event Certainty Level, a memory-based representation of exit knowledge subject to acquisition, forgetting, and recall, a continuous fear model in which panic emerges as a high-intensity state, and an OCEAN-based personality representation. Neuroticism is explicitly integrated into the emotional model, influencing fear generation, escalation, social contagion, and recovery. Behavioral heterogeneity is further captured through individualized decision thresholds that affect responses to perceived risk. The framework is evaluated through simulation experiments examining the effects of spatial familiarity, memory robustness, decision sensitivity, emotional dynamics, and personality variation. Results show that cognitive, emotional, and personality-driven processes substantially influence evacuation dynamics, reducing evacuation efficiency and generating realistic crowd phenomena such as delays, confusion, injuries, and socially influenced behaviors. The proposed framework provides a more realistic representation of human behavior in emergency evacuations and supports systematic investigation of the interactions between cognition, emotion, personality, and crowd dynamics.