Crowd behaviour and motion: Empirical methods

The safety of humans in crowded environments has been recognised as an important and rapidly growing research area with significant implications for urban planning, event management, building design, fire safety engineering and rescue service to name a few. This stream of research is aimed at guiding safe designs and effective evacuation plans by simulating emergency scenarios and estimating measures such as total evacuation time. A large body of research has also been dedicated to the development of modelling tools with the capability to identify (and thus prevent) circumstances that lead to crowd discomfort, crashes or disasters in mass gatherings and public facilities. It has, however, been argued that the empirical knowledge in this area has lagged behind the theoretical developments and computational capabilities. This has left the descriptive power of the existing models for reproducing the natural behaviour of humans questionable given that in many cases there is a lack of reliable and well-conditioned data for model validation or calibration purposes.