Citation

Haghani M. Safety Sci. 2020; 129: e104743.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2020.104743

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The role of data-driven approaches in studies of crowd behaviour has received an unprecedented recognition in recent years. As a result, the size of the empirical crowd dynamics literature has rapidly grown and has more than doubled within only the last two years. This paper comprehensively reviews experimental studies of pedestrian dynamics published between April 2017 and July 2019. The aim is to capture the unprecedented growth of the experimental literature, analyse the ways in which the research landscape is changing and identify the emerging topics. Laboratory crowd experiments were found to be the most popular method among all empirical methods, covering the most diverse range of topics and constituting nearly half of the empirical literature. The use of animal/insect crowd experiments, on the other hand, appears to be on the decline. Virtual-reality and evacuation-drill studies have maintained their popularity. Pedestrian flow at bottlenecks, walking behaviour and route choice persist to be the top conventional topics. However, new research themes have emerged or have notably gained heightened momentum. This includes the evacuation of vulnerable groups (i.e. elderly, children, mobility impaired), vertical evacuation, evacuation under limited visibility, social groups and evacuation training/education. While the top conventional topics are predominantly explored through laboratory crowd experiments, the methods of evacuation drills and virtual/augmented reality are proving more instrumental in studying the top emerging topics. This highlights the complementary relation of various experimental approaches in this field. More work seems to be needed to establish the transferability of experimental findings across methods, geometric layouts, contexts and demographics.

Language: en

Keywords

Crowd dynamics; Crowd evacuation; Crowd management; Crowd safety; Experimental methods; Pedestrian dynamics