Fifth International Conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics

In many countries, an aging population, increasing obesity and more people with impairments are bringing new challenges to the management of routine and emergency people movement. These population challenges, coupled with the innovative designs being suggested for both the built environment and other commonly used structures (e.g., transportation systems) and the increasingly complex incident scenarios of fire, terrorism, and large-scale community disasters, provide even greater challenges to population management and safety. Key to effective management procedures is a better understanding of human performance in a variety of incident scenarios, tools that assess human performance in these scenarios, and the proper use of such tools. The Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED) conference will address both pedestrian and evacuation dynamics and associated human behavior to provide answers for policy makers, designers, and emergency management to solve real world problems in this rapidly developing field.  

The Organizing and Program Committees have assembled an excellent technical program featuring a plenary on vertical egress systems as well as papers and posters on the following topics:

• Evacuation and pedestrian data collection from experiments and real events
• Data collection methods
• Behavioral theory for models
• Model development and modeling methods
• Large-scale and transport modeling
• Model validation/calibration
• Engineering guidance

In total, the program consists of 68 oral papers in (mainly) parallel sessions and 40 poster papers presented over 3 days by an international and diverse group of speakers.