Crowd dynamics modelling : a literature study

The dynamics of human crowds is an interesting, but highly complex topic, and phenomena have been observed ranging from well-organized structure formation leading to quasi steady-state equilibrium to violent and turbulent flows resulting in catastrophic scenarios with large numbers of casualties. This report reviews fifty years of scientific work on crowd dynamics. Although the aim of this report is to gain insight into the modelling of exceptional crowd events such as demonstrations and riots, a large portion of the described research deals with normal state, pedestrian traffic. This is partly due to the fact that the open literature on crowd modelling is dominated by this particular class of applications, but also because treating normal behaviour crowd dynamics is a necessary first step in modelling also the more extreme cases of crowd dynamics. The main part of the report is devoted to classifying and describing different theoretical crowd models. However, a separate section on relevant experimental work is also included. This report marks the first step towards developing a new crowd simulation tool applicable to scenarios involving human crowd and less-lethal weapons interactions.