Fundamentals of Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics

Abstract

Multi-Agent Simulation is a general and powerful framework for understanding and predicting the behaviour of social systems. Here the authors investigate the behaviour of pedestrians and human crowds, especially their physical movement. Their aim is to build a bridge between the multi-agent and pedestrian dynamics communities that facilitates the validation and calibration of modelling approaches which is essential for any application in sensitive areas like safety analysis. Understanding the dynamical properties of large crowds is of obvious practical importance. Emergency situations require efficient evacuation strategies to avoid casualties and reduce the number of injured persons. In many cases legal requirements have to be fulfilled, for example, for aircraft or cruise ships. For tests already in the planning stage reliable simulation models are required to avoid additional costs for changes in the construction. First, the empirically observed phenomena are described, emphasizing the challenges they pose for any modelling approach and their relevance for the validation and calibration. Then the authors review the basic modelling approaches used for the simulation of pedestrian dynamics in normal and emergency situations, focussing on cellular automata models. Their achievements as well as their limitations are discussed in view of the empirical results. Finally, two applications to safety analysis are briefly described.