Join GW Engineering's Transportation Engineering Program for the first installment in their Transportation Engineering Seminar series! The talk titled "Congestion in crowds -- behaviour and risks at high densitites and in crowds" will be given by Dr. Armin Seyfried from the University of Wuppertal!

Abstract

Predicting congestion in pedestrian flows is useful for planning events, transportation hubs, or escape routes in buildings. According to the state of the art, software solutions are based on agent-based models in which pedestrians are represented as two-dimensional objects (e.g., circles, ellipses, etc.). These models are able to predict congestion in complex path networks, but reach their limits when it comes to describing crowds at high densities.

The talk will use witness statements from the Love Parade in Duisburg (an event in which 31 people
died) to analyse how people behave in crowds and which dynamics lead to life-threatening situations. In a second part, a methodology will be presented for collecting data that provides a three-dimensional description of the movement and interaction of bodies (torsos and limbs) in crowds. This data is used to develop hybrid AI models in which pedestrians interact as three-dimensional objects. Using methods and concepts from social psychology, we are working on models in which the dynamic of motivation changes is described, or which analyse the spread of behaviour in crowds. Empirical data from laboratory experiments confirm the findings from the analysis of witness statements and show how slowly pushing and shoving behaviour spreads in crowds.

About The Speaker:

Armin Seyfried studied theoretical physics at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests include complex systems, pedestrian dynamics, crowds, collective phenomena and traffic with a focus on applications in security research. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly important to him in research in the field of crowd dynamics. Since 2004, he has been working at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, where he established the ‘Civil Security and Traffic’ department. In 2018, the department was transferred to the ‘Institute for Advanced Simulation’ in the ‘Civil Safety Research’ division, which Mr Seyfried heads as director. At the University of Wuppertal, he is a professor according to the Jülich model and heads the teaching and research area ‘Computer Simulation for Fire Safety and Pedestrian Traffic’.