This chapter aims to provide crowd operators with an overview, including the effects of crowd management strategies on the pedestrian choice behavior and movement dynamics. Crowd management strategies are commonly considered as the deployment of steering mechanism. The overview also includes how the profile of a crowd and environment influences pedestrian choice behavior and movement dynamics. Specifically, the study focuses on the impact of different steering mechanisms and profiling factors on pedestrian walking speed, flow rate, pedestrian route choice behavior, and pedestrian wayfinding performance. This overview is based on a review of the state-of-the-art literature, which is also presented within this chapter. It demonstrates the opportunity to employ particular steering mechanisms to manage crowds within a given environment. However, the overview also highlights some limitations in the state-of-the-art regarding the effects of the steering mechanisms, or even in the broader context of crowd management. Specific challenges for future crowd management research are discussed, which could provide crowd operators with more insights into the quantitative effect of crowd management strategies in a given environment.

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 lighting, both the brightness level and the light color, on pedestrian route choice is studied. A virtual maze was designed, featuring 10 T-intersections, where the light conditions are varied at each T-intersection to study its impact on pedestrian route choice. Our study shows that pedestrian route choice is strongly influenced by the light color in a virtual environment. Pedestrians prefer to follow paths with green-colored lights and avoid paths with red-colored lights, irrespective of the light color on the other path. Moreover, pedestrians slightly prefer to use the path with a higher brightness level. Lastly, the results indicate that pedestrians do have a slight right-handed tendency on average, however, this effect cancels out almost completely when other guidance information is present in the scenario. Altogether, the findings suggest that lighting can impact pedestrian route choice behavior.

Although numerous studies used Virtual Reality (VR) to study pedestrian behavior, there is an ongoing debate about the validity of using VR for studying pedestrian behavior. This study aims to contribute toward the validation of immersive VR systems for pedestrian wayfinding behavior studies by conducting a direct comparison of a field experiment and a matched virtual experiment. Both experiments feature three identical wayfinding assignments across multiple floors in a building. To evaluate the ecological validity of VR, three metrics of three different levels of wayfinding behavior are adopted, namely travel time (level: wayfinding performance), wayfinding strategy (level: decision-making), and angular speed of the head (level: observational behavior). Our findings show that VR can be used to study pedestrian wayfinding strategy in buildings with a single floor. However, there are significant differences in pedestrian wayfinding strategy between the field experiment and the VR experiment. Additionally, we found significant differences in the angular speed of the head between the two experiments. It suggests that researchers should take caution when using VR as a research tool to study the wayfinding strategy and the observational behavior of pedestrians in multi-story buildings.