New Division "Civil Security and Traffic" at JSC

A new division "Civil Security and Traffic" was established at JSC in May 2012. This division grew out of a working group that had been developing simulation models in the areas of fire safety and pedestrian dynamics at JSC over the past few years. The research activities conducted so far were supported by BMBF (Hermes) and DFG and were completed in 2011.

Since the demand for research on civil security is rising and has become a priority at BMBF and HGF, the new division will strengthen further developments in this research area. It will also work on the HGF portfolio project "Security Research", in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR – German Aerospace Centre, project leader). Funding for the portfolio amounts to a total of € 14 million.

Furthermore, the division is collaborating on the new BMBF-funded project BaSiGo launched in March 2012. One goal of this project is to understand the emergence of critical states in large crowds. Therefore, large-scale experiments are planned and will be conducted with up to 1000 people.

The new division aims to strengthen its pioneering role in the conception and execution of large-scale laboratory experiments involving pedestrians, in the analysis and evaluation of these experiments, and in the development of models for pedestrian dynamics. Moreover, in order to foster this research field, the models and analysis tools developed so far have been made available to the scientific community in the form of two open source projects combined with a database of experimental results.

In cooperation with the University of Wuppertal and the University of Cologne, it is planned to extend these activities from the local evacuation of buildings and venues to the evacuation of cities or regions, where intermodal traffic also has to be considered.
(Contact: Prof. Dr. Armin Seyfried, a.seyfried@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 205, 15 June 2012