Models of pedestrian flow stumble because people change their minds

(credit: Flickr user Andree Lüdtke)

Every year, the Dutch physics community gets together to celebrate the year in physics. These are some highlights from the meeting. Since it is a meeting, it is not possible to link to published work (a talk could cover multiple papers or just parts of papers). Where possible, we've linked to the research group that presented the work.

The flow of pedestrians is a critical part of the design of buildings, stadiums, and much more. The obvious reason is that designers need to ensure that people can exit the building quickly in case of a disaster, but it goes much further than that. Are people significantly impeded during normal use? Where will people congregate and will this obstruct access to various parts of the building? All of this and more must go in to the building design.

Most pedestrian models are reasonably simple. Pedestrians are particles that are driven by some force to go in a direction; they don’t collide with each other because there is a repulsive force between them keeping them apart. At their most simple, the models can treat pedestrians as a hard sphere—the pedestrians touch and bounce off each other like billiard balls. However, you can use any number of different physical models to study pedestrian interactions.

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