Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics

Book excerpt: Is the behaviour of a crowd in an emergency situation predictable? Are the different patterns occurring in pedestrian flow based on common rules? How does panic change human reactions? These and other questions have been the scope of the international conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics. This book contains elaborate manuscripts written by scientists as well as practitioners from various disciplines: architecture, civil, naval and fire safety engineering, physics, computer science and mathematics. There has been considerable progress over the last decade and the central topic of human motion and behaviour has come more and more into the centre of interest, mainly due to increasing computer power and the development of new simulation models. This is the first conference dealing with modelling and simulation of pedestrian and crowd movement as well as the dynamical aspects of evacuation processes.