Fifth International Conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics, Gaithersburg (USA)
8-10 March 2010, National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, USA
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 conference is expected to cover areas such as:
- New data relating to human performance:
- Understanding human performance in emergency and non-emergency scenarios, including experiments, drills, and the investigation of real incidents.
- New insights into our understanding of evacuation/pedestrian dynamics derived from new or existing human performance data.
- New methods of data collection, extraction, and data analysis.
- New modeling of evacuation and pedestrian dynamics:
- Advances in evacuation/pedestrian dynamics models that utilize a novel approach within existing models.
- New modeling capabilities that utilize a novel approach within existing models.
- New insights into our understanding of evacuation/pedestrian dynamics derived from modeling
- Validation efforts associated with evacuation/pedestrian models.
- Novel applications of models or methods:
- Challenging engineering applications of emergency/non-emergency models.
- Regulatory challenges associated with engineering applications.
- New methods of generating/presenting model results.
