Thesis Defense | February 02, 08:00

Analysis of the microscopic structure of pedestrian bottleneck flow based on experiments and simulations

Jonas Rzezonka

Improving the understanding of pedestrian crowd dynamics is a growing field with essential contributions from many areas of science utilizing empirical data and mathematical models. Pedestrians systems exhibit a number of self-organization phenomena like lane formation and temporal clogging which are interesting from a physics perspective. Simulations of these scenarios can improve the understanding of these phenomena by focusing on minimal models that can reproduce the observations. Many of these phenomena in pedestrian dynamics are not unique to the system and are observed in related fields like granular materials, colloids, and active matter. The presented work introduces methods from solid-state physics and granular matter to quantify the spatial order of pedestrian systems. The focus is on bottleneck flow when a crowd has to pass a spatially restricted area (e.g., a door leading to a hall), a crucial scenario in pedestrian dynamics and the flow of granular matter.


Institut für Theoretische Physik
Seminar Room R0.02, ETP
Contact: Andreas Schadschneider