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Current challenges in pedestrian dynamics and crowd modeling

Friday, February 25, 3PM
POB 6.304

Pierre Degond

Understanding Pedestrian and crowd dynamics is an important issue in modern societies. Recent crowd disasters (e.g. Duisburg love parade (July 2010) or Cambodia water festival (November 2010)) have put the safety issues in the forward scene. Another important issue the is efficiency of public arenas such as subway corridors, train or airport terminals, or shopping malls. Many different kinds of models of pedestrian and crowd dynamics exist, from the discrete (individual-based) ones to the continuum ones. The talk will review the sallient features of these models. However, most of the existing models suffer from a poor validation against experimental data. There are many difficulties ranging from ethical to technical ones which explain why the data are scarce. We will report on a series of experiments that have been conducted in the 'Pedigree' project in France and the preliminary findings that have resulted from these data. Future modeling directions and challenges will be discussed.

Host: I. Gamba