Studying the impact of lighting on the pedestrian route choice using Virtual Reality

Efficient crowd management is essential for optimizing the performance of pedestrian infrastructures, either in terms of crowd flow or pedestrian levels of safety and comfort. This study investigates the impact of one type of crowd management measure, namely lighting, on pedestrian behavior. Using Virtual Reality experiments, the impact of...

Studying the Pedestrian Level-of-Service (PLoS): Lessons regarding the combination of survey and monitoring data

Crowding is often analyzed using crowd dynamics variables. Yet, it is questionable whether quantitative variables fully describe the perception of crowdedness. This paper presents four case studies into the Pedestrian Level-of-Service (PLoS), featuring a 1) mass event, 2) shopping environment, 3) festival, and 4) touristic hotspot. The...

Evacuation behaviors and emergency communications: An analysis of real-world incident videos

Emergencies such as fires and terrorist attacks pose risks of injuries and fatalities, which can be exacerbated by delayed, ill-informed, or unmanaged responses. Effective emergency communication strategies could be used to better inform people and reduce these risks. This research analyzes videos of real-world emergencies to: (a) identify...

Examining evacuee response to emergency communications with agent-based simulations

To improve communication during emergencies, this research introduces an agent-based modeling (ABM) method to test the effect of psychological emergency communication strategies on evacuation performance. We follow a generative social science approach in which agent-based simulations allow for testing different candidate solutions. Unlike...

Crowd characterization for crowd management using social media data in city events

Large-scale events are becoming more frequent in contemporary cities, increasing the need for novel methods and tools that can provide relevant stakeholders with quantitative and qualitative insights about attendees’ characteristics. In this work, we investigate how social media can be used to provide such insights. First, we screen a set of...

Enhancing crowd monitoring system functionality through data fusion: Estimating flow rate from wi-fi traces and automated counting system data

Crowd monitoring systems (CMSs) provide a state-of-the-art solution to manage crowds objectively. Most crowd monitoring systems feature one type of sensor, which severely limits the insights one can simultaneously gather regarding the crowd’s traffic state. Incorporating multiple functionally complementary sensor types is expensive. CMSs are...

A landscape of crowd-management support: An integrative approach

Of the many crowd behavior models, very few have been used in assisting crowd management practice. This lack of usage is partly due to crowd management involving a diversity of situations that require competencies in observing, sense-making, anticipating and acting. Crowd research is similarly scattered across disciplines and needs integration...