A Harmony Search Algorithm for the Reproduction of Experimental Data in the Social Force Model

Crowd dynamics is a discipline dealing with the management and flow of crowds in congested places and circumstances. Pedestrian congestion is a pressing issue where crowd dynamics models can be applied. The reproduction of experimental data (velocity‐density relation and specific flow rate) is a major component for the validation and calibration of such models. In the social force model, researchers have proposed various techniques to adjust essential parameters governing the repulsive social force, which is an effort at reproducing such experimental data. Despite that and various other efforts, the optimal reproduction of the real life data is unachievable. In this paper, a harmony search‐based technique called HS‐SFM is proposed to overcome the difficulties of the calibration process for SFM, where the fundamental diagram of velocity‐density relation and the specific flow rate are reproduced in conformance with the related empirical data. The improvisation process of HS is modified by incorporating the global best particle concept from particle swarm optimization (PSO) to increase the convergence rate and overcome the high computational demands of HS‐SFM. Simulation results have shown HS‐FSM’s ability to produce near optimal SFM parameter values, which makes it possible for SFM to almost reproduce the related empirical data.