  This article introduces a modeling framework to characterize evacuee response
to environmental stimuli during emergency egress. The model is developed in
consistency with stress theory, which explains how an organism reacts to
environmental stressors. We integrate the theory into the well-known
social-force model, and develop a framework to simulate crowd evacuation
behavior in multi-compartment buildings. Our method serves as a theoretical
basis to study crowd movement at bottlenecks, and simulate their herding and
way-finding behavior in normal and hazardous conditions. The pre-movement
behavior is also briefly investigated by using opinion dynamics with social
group model. The algorithms have been partly tested in FDS+EVAC as well as our
simulation platform crowdEgress.
