Impact of Conflicting Architectural Designs on Crowd Dynamics By Zahra Shahhosseini

Zahra Shahhosseini is a PhD student at The University of Melbourne whom I have been co-supervising with Prof. Majid Sarvi since 2014. Her research includes studying and modeling dynamics of pedestrian crowds under panic. Zahra presented her research progress on the Impact of Conflicting Architectural Designs on Crowd Dynamics at the transportation seminar at The University of Melbourne.

​Abstract: The need for developing reliable models for making simulated predictions of crowd evacuations has necessitated understanding of fundamental rules that govern human behavior during emergency escapes. One major challenge to address this particular problem, however, has been the lack of experimental data of panicked humans in which speeds and desire to flee are taken to extremes. This presentation reports on a research study with ultimate aim of developing such forecast tools which is capable of capturing human interactions with physically or psychologically complex environmental settings based on concrete empirical evidence. In this study, we utilize two types of empirical data, one obtained from experiments with biological entities and the other from experiments with human. This presentation will report on the findings corresponding to the understanding of the impact of conflicting geometries (i.e. merging sections) on human and non-human entities collective movements based on macroscopic level analyses of the data derived from those experiments.