Michael Schreckenberg – författare

The 6th International Conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED2012) showcased research on human locomotion. This book presents the proceedings of PED2012.

Humans have walked for eons; our drive to settle the globe began with a walk out of Africa. However, much remains to discover. As the world moves toward sustainability while racing to assess and accommodate climate change, research must provide insight on the physical requirements of walking, the dynamics of pedestrians on the move and more. We must understand, predict and simulate pedestrian behaviour, to avoid dangerous situations, to plan for emergencies, and not least, to make walking more attractive and enjoyable.

PED2012 offered 70 presentations and keynote talks as well as 70 poster presentations covering new and improved mathematical models, describing new insights on pedestrian behaviour in normal and emergency cases and presenting research based on sensors and advanced observation methods. These papers offer a starting point for innovative new research, building a strong foundation for the next conference and for future research.

Due to an increasing number of reported catastrophes all over the world, the safety especially of pedestrians today, is a dramatically growing field of interest, both for practitioners as well as scientists from various disciplines. The questions arising mainly address the dynamics of evacuating people and possible optimisations of the process by changing the architecture and /or the procedure. This concerns not only the case of ships, stadiums or buildings, all with restricted geometries, but also the evacuation of complete geographical regions due to natural disasters. Furthermore, also ‘simple’ crowd motion in ‘relaxed’ situations poses new questions with respect to higher comfort and efficiency since the number of involved persons at large events is as high as never before. In addition, as a new research topic in this field, collective animal behaviour is attracting increasing attention. All this was in the scope of the conference held in Vienna, September 28–30, 2005, the third one in a series after Duisburg (2001) and Greenwich (2003).

How do people behave in different traffic situations? Are there general laws for mathematical modelling of decision dynamics? The answers, given at the first international workshop on "Human Behaviour in Traffic Networks", are presented in this volume. In 13 articles, well-known experts report about their current work on experiments and modelling in this area. The topics range from psychological behaviour in traffic situations, traffic simulations of various aspects and market analysis to experiments with human participants used in experimental economics. The articles filled with many illustrations are aimed at interested students as well as experts in this field.

During the last decade physicists, engineers and computer scientists have joined in an enormously fruitful dialogue about traffic and granular flow. Cars and sand grains have in common, that they interact irreversibly, which is the reason for similar jamming phenomena. The main difference is that car drivers choose their destination and route individually, while grains follow external driving forces. This book gives an overview about the progress in modelling, computer simulation, experiments and field observations, which was reached within the last two years. The contributions are based on the International Workshop Traffic and Granular Flow ''01, which took place in Nagoya, 15 - 17 October 2001. Topics include a critical classification of models for highway traffic, new technological applications, friction and arching phenomena in pedestrian traffic, scale free networks and internet traffic, instabilities and fluctuations in avalanches and granular pipe flow.