Deciphering the laws of crowding
With the help of several hundred test participants, experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Bergische Universität Wuppertal spent three days testing how forces and information are propagated in densely packed crowds. The experiments, which will continue until today, use special suits that detect movements of the entire body via sensors. The experiments are part of the CrowdDNA research project and are intended to help increase safety in crowded public places and at mass events. (Source: Forschungszentrum Jülich – Press releases)
Unexpected pushing can quickly turn into a real safety risk. It can be particularly dangerous when people are standing close together, for example at large events or when crowds of people gather in public places. In the EU-funded research project CrowdDNA, experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Bergische Universität Wuppertal are investigating the prevailing forces and key psychological factors in such crowds. Together with project partners from France, Spain and Germany, they have prepared various experiments for several hundred test persons at the University of Wuppertal.
For example, the test participants have to squeeze through an entrance in groups, are subjected to sudden pushes while standing in line, or encounter each other in various constellations. In this way, the researchers hope to gain a deep insight into the physical forces acting on the test subjects. And they want to gain new insights into the spread of information in the midst of a crowd, how people communicate with each other, in which direction they pass on information. Video analyses and special suits for measuring movement, Xsens 3D motion tracking suits, provide extensive data to capture a high-resolution image of the dynamic events: Which body parts come into contact? How do pushes propagate through a crowd? And how do the strength of the push, the arrangement of the subjects and the distance between them affect body balance and thus the risk of falling?
“The experiments are intended to help improve the physical understanding of crowd dynamics at a very fundamental level,” explains experiment leader Prof. Armin Seyfried from Topic 1: “Enabling Computational- & Data-intensive Science and Engineering” of Program 1: “Engineering Digital Futures” of the Helmholtz Research Field Information. “The ultimate goal is to gain a cross-scale understanding in order to be able to infer the prevailing force conditions and possible dangers for individuals from easily measurable quantities such as the speed of movement or density of people.”
The findings are intended to lay the foundation for a new generation of crowd analysis and simulation systems that are based less on empirical values and can precisely predict the dynamics of crowds using scientifically based characteristics. In the CrowdDNA project, experts from physics, psychology, computer science and machine learning are working closely with companies from the fields of crowd simulation and crowd management to achieve this.
The original press release can be found at:
Die Gesetze des Drängelns entschlüsseln (only in german)
Localization in the Helmholtz Research Field Information:
Helmholtz Research Field Information, Program 1: Engineering Digital Futures, Topic 1: Enabling Computational- & Data-Intensive Science and Engineering
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Armin Seyfried
Head of the group for civil safety research at the Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS)
Phone: +49 2461/61-3437
E-Mail: a.seyfried@fz-juelich.de
Contact for this press release:
Tobias Schlößer
Press Officer
Forschungszentrum Jülich
Tel.: +49 2461 61-4771
E-Mail: t.schloesser@fz-juelich.de
