Essay On Crowd Behaviour Analysis

Crowd behaviour analysis is an active area of research. It has in its scope various flourishing areas of study- including, but not limited to- global path planning of pedestrians, behaviour of crowds in evacuation and the impact of obstacles on pedestrian flow. In many experiments, especially pertaining to panic situations, it is important to have realistic crowd simulation models to test results. In order to do this, it is important to understand how a crowd behaves in various scenarios and also to observe how individuals in a crowd interact with each other.
Professor Keith G. Still (2000) in his research on crowd dynamics had provided a set of conditions and suggestions to manage and observe crowds, based on JJ Fruin’s early guidelines on

Kirkland and Maciejewski (2003) proposed some suggestions to use robots to influence crowd dynamics. They used Helbing and Molnar’s social force model (1995) to simulate crowds and had incorporated those rules to control the robots, who tried to guide the pedestrians and follow as regular and orderly a path to the exit as possible.
They came up with different examples to showcase how adding obstacles, appropriately placed, can counter-intuitively aid in fast egress, or evacuation, of the pedestrians. Using examples of widenings of corridors to illustrate how pedestrians will react to their disadvantage in such situations, it was noted that by occupying the excess space, bottlenecks are created when the widening has been crossed. In such situations, they suggest the use of robots to patrol the area and ensure that pedestrians stay in the desired path for faster egress. They also compared the results of using both mobile and stationary robots on the crowd. However, as the results are preliminary with only limited scene topologies tested, it is too early to say if they indeed will prove to be