Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics

Evacuation and crowd dynamics research examines how groups of people move, make decisions, and interact under both ordinary and emergency conditions, with the goal of understanding what determines whether a crowd flows safely or becomes dangerously congested. Computational tools such as cellular automaton models, social force models, and agent-based simulations allow researchers to represent individual pedestrians as rule-following agents whose local choices collectively produce large-scale crowd behavior — patterns that are difficult to predict from intuition alone. Much of the current work focuses on how accurately these models capture real human behavior, particularly the role of panic, social influence, and incomplete information in shaping evacuation outcomes. Open challenges include validating simulations against empirical data from actual emergencies, and extending models to complex environments such as ships, offshore platforms, and coastal infrastructure where geometry and environmental hazards add additional layers of difficulty.

Works

54,133

Total citations

444,340

Keywords

Pedestrian DynamicsEvacuationCrowd BehaviorSimulationCellular AutomatonSocial Force Model