Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics

Evacuation and crowd dynamics research examines how individuals and groups move through built environments under both ordinary and emergency conditions, drawing on physics, behavioral science, and computational modeling to understand phenomena like bottleneck congestion, lane formation, and the counterintuitive slowdowns that can arise when people rush. Techniques such as the social force model—which treats pedestrians as particles subject to repulsive and attractive forces—and agent-based simulations allow researchers to test evacuation scenarios that would be dangerous or impossible to stage in reality. In maritime and coastal engineering contexts, the stakes are especially high: ship evacuations and harbor emergencies involve confined spaces, moving platforms, and passengers with widely varying physical capabilities. Active questions include how to accurately capture human decision-making under panic, how model parameters should be calibrated from sparse real-incident data, and how simulation tools can be made reliable enough to directly inform the design of exits, corridors, and emergency protocols.

Works

53,365

Total citations

439,423

Keywords

Pedestrian DynamicsEvacuationCrowd BehaviorSimulationCellular AutomatonSocial Force Model