Introduction

Pedestrian Dynamics - Empiricism

Controlled experiments allow the quantitative description of pedestrian dynamics and enable the analysis of selected parameters under well-defined constant conditions. Data of these experiments is collected and analyzed by appropriately selected sensors and self-developed software.

The dynamics of pedestrians shows complex transport characteristics and interesting collective phenomena. Understanding them is highly relevant for a wide range of applications in civil engineering like the evaluation of escape routes in the context of crowd management or the optimization of pedestrian facilities for urban development. Our aim is the quantitative description of pedestrian dynamics by investigating influencing aspects.

The group has taken a pioneering role in the conception and execution of large-scale laboratory experiments involving pedestrians. The design of our experiments has been driven by the idea of simplification to reduce unintentional effects, to control parameters of interest and thus to ensure reproducibility. This covers the automatic collection of data like individual trajectories of each person and the analysis and evaluation of the information using high standard methods based on Voronoi decomposition.

To increase the transparency of the research activities and promote a sustainable development, the analysis tools and self-developed data extraction software are freely available as well as the collected data itself.

Further Information

Project CroMa: Seeking Solutions to Overcrowding at Train Stations

Crowd Experiment at University of Wuppertal