Self-Organization Phenomena in Pedestrian Crowds
arXiv:cond-mat/9806152
Abstract
Pedestrian crowds can very realistically be simulated with a social force model which describes the different influences affecting individual pedestrian motion by a few simple force terms. The model is able to reproduce the emergence of several empirically observed collective patterns of motion. These self-organization phenomena can be utilized for new flow optimization methods which are indispensable for skilful town- and traffic-planning.
For related work see http://www.theo2.physik.uni-stuttgart.de/helbing.html and http://galaxy.cau.edu/molnar and http://summa.physik.hu-berlin.de:80/~frank/index.html