TY - JOUR
T1 - Animal dynamics based approach for modeling pedestrian crowd egress under panic conditions
AU - Shiwakoti, Nirajan
AU - Sarvi, Majid
AU - Rose, Geoffrey
AU - Burd, Martin
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Collective movement is important during emergencies such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, when rapid egress is
essential for escape. Collective patterns are not restricted to humans, but have been observed in other non-human biological
systems. Social animals often move in groups: ant trails, wildebeest migrations, and locust swarms are some of the natural phenomena at the heart of a movement ecology (Holden, 2006). Although most collective movements are routine, there are rare but perilous crowd panics that may sharply affect survival and fitness, like stampedes of wildebeest under predator attack, evacuations of ant nests in the face of flooding, or flights of people from burning buildings. Not enough is known about the underlying dynamics of crowd panics, despite the obvious importance of such knowledge in the human sphere. Studies of human crowds during evacuations were carried out as early as 1930s (Kholshevnikov and Samoshin, 2008), but the problem of understanding panicking groups and enhancing safety under emergency conditions still exists (Helbing et al., 2000).The complex interactions of panicking individuals with their social and physical environments make theoretical understanding difficult. Models of pedestrian behavior in emergency situations rarely have complementary empirical data to validate the model s prediction, so we may not want to rely entirely on mathematical models before scaling up to an applied, real
world situation. That lack of data is most likely a major factor explaining why very few models exist which focus on panic
situations. The bulk of the literature is restricted to the study of normal (non-panic) pedestrian dynamics or normal evacuation
processes (Still, 2000; Hoogendoorn and Bovy, 2002; Hoogendoorn, 2004; Daamen, 2004; Antonini et al., 2006; Kretz, 2007; Asano et al., 2009). Even the researchers who developed the few existing models of crowd panic have identified the need for more rigorous modeling frameworks and the development of approaches to assess the reliability of model predictions.
AB - Collective movement is important during emergencies such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, when rapid egress is
essential for escape. Collective patterns are not restricted to humans, but have been observed in other non-human biological
systems. Social animals often move in groups: ant trails, wildebeest migrations, and locust swarms are some of the natural phenomena at the heart of a movement ecology (Holden, 2006). Although most collective movements are routine, there are rare but perilous crowd panics that may sharply affect survival and fitness, like stampedes of wildebeest under predator attack, evacuations of ant nests in the face of flooding, or flights of people from burning buildings. Not enough is known about the underlying dynamics of crowd panics, despite the obvious importance of such knowledge in the human sphere. Studies of human crowds during evacuations were carried out as early as 1930s (Kholshevnikov and Samoshin, 2008), but the problem of understanding panicking groups and enhancing safety under emergency conditions still exists (Helbing et al., 2000).The complex interactions of panicking individuals with their social and physical environments make theoretical understanding difficult. Models of pedestrian behavior in emergency situations rarely have complementary empirical data to validate the model s prediction, so we may not want to rely entirely on mathematical models before scaling up to an applied, real
world situation. That lack of data is most likely a major factor explaining why very few models exist which focus on panic
situations. The bulk of the literature is restricted to the study of normal (non-panic) pedestrian dynamics or normal evacuation
processes (Still, 2000; Hoogendoorn and Bovy, 2002; Hoogendoorn, 2004; Daamen, 2004; Antonini et al., 2006; Kretz, 2007; Asano et al., 2009). Even the researchers who developed the few existing models of crowd panic have identified the need for more rigorous modeling frameworks and the development of approaches to assess the reliability of model predictions.
KW - Biological entities
KW - Crowd dynamics
KW - Evacuation
KW - Pedestrians panic
KW - Scaling
KW - Self-organization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=83555178540&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.trb.2011.05.016
DO - 10.1016/j.trb.2011.05.016
M3 - Article
SN - 0191-2615
VL - 45
SP - 1433
EP - 1449
JO - Transportation Research Part B: Methodological
JF - Transportation Research Part B: Methodological
IS - 9
ER -