Locomotion strategies and injury potential in dense pedestrian crowds

• Applicants: Maik Boltes, Ph.D.; Professor Uwe Kersting, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Human Factors, Ergonomics, Human-Machine Systems ; Traffic and Transport Systems, Intelligent and Automated Traffic
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548103776

Compressing pedestrian flows are and everyday reality, for example at traffic hubs such as train stations and airports, as well as at major events. In the past, there have been repeated accidents involving personal injury, such as a Halloween celebration in Seoul at the end of 2022 with 159 fatalities or the Love Parade 2010 in Duisburg, where 21 people lost their lives and over 600 others were injured, some of them seriously. These accidents are usually preceded by a concentration of people at passages and bottlenecks, where the movements of individuals are increasingly influenced by their surroundings. This in turn leads to a change in individual movement behavior, although precisely this interaction within a crowd between an individual and surrounding people has not yet been studied in detail. In order to understand the movement behavior in dense flows of people and to measure the associated risk of injury, approaches from movement science and pedestrian dynamics are being combined for the first time. A three-part project plan envisages first (1) determining the risk factors for injuries in a crowd on the basis of existing data and interviews with relevant groups of people such as security staff and second (2) experimentally investigating the influence of the crowd density, motivation, gender, age and physical fitness of a person on overall body movement inside a crowd, and third (3) to analyze the factors modulating injury risk in detailed experiments, looking at altering loads at the level of individual joints and identifying compensation strategies from the perspective of the individual. The results of this project will provide a better understanding of the movement adaptation of individuals in dense crowds and the associated injury risks. These new insights will allow for improved modeling of the dynamics in a crowd, taking into account three-dimensional body movement. In addition, the results will show the injury potential and describe it as a function of individual characteristics such as age and boundary conditions such as motivation, thus making it possible to take these relationships into account in future safety planning.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants