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Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation Dynamics

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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

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The modeling of pedestrian motion is of great theoretical and practical interest. Recentexperimental efforts have revealed quantitative details of pedestrian interactions, which have been successfully cast into mathematicalequations. Furthermore, corresponding computer simulations of large numbers of pedestrians have been compared with the empirically observed dynamics ofcrowds. Such studies have led to a deeper understanding of how collective behavior on a macroscopic scale emerges from individual humaninteractions. Interestingly enough, the non-linear interactions of pedestrians lead to various complex, spatio-temporalpattern-formation phenomena. This includes the emergence of lanes of uniform walking direction, oscillations of the pedestrian flow at bottlenecks,and the formation of stripes in two intersecting flows. Such self-organized patterns of motion demonstrate that efficient, “intelligent”collective dynamics...

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Abbreviations

Collective intelligence:

Emergent functional behavior of a large number of people that results from interactions of individuals rather than from individual reasoning or global optimization.

Crowd :

Agglomeration of many people in the same area at the same time. The density of the crowd is assumed to be high enough to cause continuous interactions with or reactions to other individuals.

Crowd turbulence:

Unanticipated and unintended irregular motion of individuals into different directions due to strong and rapidly changing forces in crowds of extreme density.

Emergence:

Spontaneous establishment of a qualitatively new behavior through non-linear interactions of many objects or subjects.

Evolutionary optimization:

Gradual optimization based on the effect of frequently repeated random mutations and selection processes based on some success function (“fitness”).

Faster-is-slower effect:

This term reflects the observation that certain processes (in evacuation situations, production, traffic dynamics, or logistics) take more time if performed at high speed. In other words, waiting can often help to coordinate the activities of several competing units and to speed up the average progress.

Freezing-by-heating effect:

Noise-induced blockage effect caused by the breakdown of direction-segregated walking patterns (typically two or more “lanes” characterized by a uniform direction of motion). “Noise” means frequent variations of the walking direction due to nervousness or impatience in the crowd, e.?g. also frequent overtaking maneuvers in dense, slowly moving crowds.

Panic :

Breakdown of ordered, cooperative behavior of individuals due to anxious reactions to a certain event. Often, panic is characterized by attempted escape of many individuals from a real or perceived threat in situations of a perceived struggle for survival, which may end up in trampling or crushing of people in a crowd.

Self-organization:

Spontaneous organization (i.?e. formation of ordered patterns) not induced by initial or boundary conditions, by regulations or constraints. Self-organization is a result of non-linear interactions between many objects or subjects, and it often causes different kinds of spatio-temporal patterns of motion.

Social force:

Vector describing acceleration or deceleration effects that are caused by social interactions rather than by physical interactions or fields.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for partial financial support by the German Research Foundation(research projects He 2789/7-1, 8-1) and by the “Cooperative Center for Communication Networks Data Analysis”, a NAP project sponsored bythe Hungarian National Office of Research and Technology under grant No. KCKHA005.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Dirk Helbing & Anders Johansson

  2. Institute for Advanced Study, Collegium Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

    Dirk Helbing

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  1. Dirk Helbing
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  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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Helbing, D., Johansson, A. (2009). Pedestrian, Crowd and Evacuation Dynamics. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_382

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