Experiments with Pedestrians Conducted at the University of Melbourne

In March 2017, Prof. Majid Sarvi conducted a series of laboratory experiments together with colleagues from the Transport Engineering Group at the University of Melbourne to investigate the dynamics in pedestrian streams and to study the wayfinding inside complex spatial structures. Two JSC staff members from the Civil Security and Traffic division were invited to these studies. Within the framework of the cooperative project, which was entitled “A real-time modelling of crowd dynamics for disaster prevention”, they supported the study in the planning phase and during the realization of the experiments through the collection of trajectories. Eight experimental setups were built and examined, including bottlenecks and rooms with multiple exits. In addition, different motivation levels were tested to analyse the influence of competition on the performance.
(Contact: Dr. Maik Boltes, m.boltes@fz-juelich.de).

JSC News No. 249, April 2017