Pedestrian Dynamics – Academic Update

derRSE 2026

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The sixth German Conference on Research Software Engineering (derRSE26) will be held at the University of Stuttgart from March 3rd to 5th, 2026.

Talk

JuPedSim: From Obscure Executables to a Publicly Documented Library

Speaker: Mr Kai Kratz

JuPedSim is an open-source framework for simulating how pedestrians move through buildings, public spaces, and city environments. For years, it was one of those research tools that “just worked” — if you knew how to use it. The software has been part of the pedestrian dynamics community for over 15 years, supporting research and practice from evacuation planning to urban mobility studies.

By 2020, though, JuPedSim had grown into a collection of hard-to-maintain executables driven by complex XML files: powerful, but opaque, and increasingly inaccessible to new users. At some point, we realized we couldn’t keep patching it forever. We needed to rethink what JuPedSim was for and who it was for. That’s where the real RSE story begins.

We set out to reshape JuPedSim into a modern, community-oriented library — and learned a lot along the way. The transformation was not primarily a technical one; it was a story about stakeholders, sustainability, and focus.

We rebuilt JuPedSim as a Python module with a modular C++ core, but the key change was philosophical: API over configuration, explicit over implicit. Instead of hiding behavior behind large configuration files, we encourage users to express their ideas directly in code. It’s not about convenience; it’s about clarity and reproducibility. We want people to understand what their simulation does, not just run it. This shift changed how the community interacts with the tool — making experiments more reproducible, the codebase more maintainable, and the system easier to teach and extend.

This journey wasn’t purely technical, it required full stakeholder commitment. None of this would have happened without support from domain scientists, developers, and institutions. Gaining that trust meant learning to communicate in their terms: why change was necessary, what would be gained, and how it would affect their work. Along the way, we faced the classic second-system problem — the temptation to rebuild everything, and learned that doing less was often better. We focused on the essentials, dropped non-core tools like JpsEditor, and spun out independent, focused projects such as PedPy, a Python analysis library that became a success in its own right.

Finally, we’ll reflect on governance, documentation, and long-term sustainability: how to keep a research software project alive beyond funding cycles and how to turn a codebase into a community.

This talk isn’t about code or performance. It’s about what it takes to turn a long-running research codebase into something sustainable — building trust, reducing complexity, and creating space for others to contribute.

In short: how we learned to do less, but better.

Keywords: pedestrian dynamics, research software engineering, sustainability, governance, community building, Python/C++ hybrid, documentation.

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IBIT Conference 2026

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Overview and Topics

The 11th IBIT Conference on Crowdmanagement & Event Safety Management brought together professionals from diverse fields, including representatives from authorities, event organizers, operators, safety planners, security services, and researchers. This year’s conference featured six distinct sessions addressing various aspects of contemporary challenges in event safety:

Back to Basics: Introduction to Modern Safety Planning 2026
Hostile Vehicle Mititgation as a Guarantee for Safe Events?
Best Practice: Transferable Insights and Pragmatic Approaches
Where do the Rules come from? Regulations, Standards, and Guidelines
Operational Aspects and Procedures
Legal Aspects

Unlike previous years, the conference did not include a dedicated research session. However, research topics were integrated into several sessions, highlighting the importance of scientific input for practical applications in event safety—and vice versa.

Concert crowd model in the exhibition area

Contributions from the Pedestrian Dynamics Community

Speaker: Anna Sieben, Jette Degenhardt and Mohcine Chraibi

Transfer Workshop

The workshop “Pedestrian Dynamics: From Laboratory to Practice – From Practice to Laboratory,” presented by Anna Sieben and Jette Degenhardt, addressed the challenge of knowledge transfer between research and practice.

In research, knowledge is generated that does not always reach practical implementation. Scientific findings are relevant for all stakeholders, as they continuously influence guidelines and standards. Practitioners, on the other hand, possess extensive knowledge about crowds, often communicated differently than scientific insights and therefore not systematically incorporated into research. There is a lack of mechanisms to actively shape research based on practical input (and vice versa).

Anna and Jette provided an overview of current research questions and facilitated a discussion. The discussion revealed that practitioners desire more insights on the following topics:

Influence of lighting conditions and different floor surfaces on crowds
Research on perception of signs and wayfinding systems
Behavior under stress conditions and in extreme situations (perceptible dangers such as loud noises or fires)
Analysis of decision-making processes in dynamic crowd situations
Further development of VR tools for crowd simulation and training purposes

JuPedSim News: From Research to Practical Application

Mohcine Chraibi presented “From Research for Practice: A Simulation Tool for Pedestrian Flow Analysis,” introducing the JuPedSim Web App. The open-source software, previously used primarily within the scientific community, is now accessible through this online platform.

The tool enables the configuration and simulation of pedestrian flow scenarios based on validated models. While currently focused on basic scenarios, the long-term vision includes application to more complex situations. The JuPedSim team aims to enhance the tool’s practical applicability and seeks user feedback to further improve its functionality for broader use.

By: Jette Degenhardt

Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2025

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The 12th edition of Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED 2025) was held from 9 to 12 September 2025 at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czechia, organized by the Faculty of Information Technology and the Faculty of Civil Engineering—the youngest and oldest faculties of the university, respectively.

Altogether, 138 researchers from 19 countries participated in the conference, discussing over 60 oral and 41 poster presentations. Forty-two contributions were transformed into proceedings papers, published on 22 June 2026 in Acta Polytechnica CTU Proceedings.

Starting with a Practical PhD Workshop

The first day, 9 September 2025, was dedicated to the PhD workshop focusing on data acquisition from pedestrian experiments. The organising team and two invited lecturers welcomed 35 participants.

After a brief introduction by Hana Najmanová to the ethical and legislative aspects of pedestrian experiments, the participants signed informed consents and became part of a bottleneck evacuation experiment on site. With the help of the Image Processing Laboratory, the experiment was recorded and the data were directly available for the afternoon practical part of the event.

Snapshot from the workshop experiment. Participants of the workshop were provided with the raw data together with pre-processed trajectories for comparison.

The crucial part of the workshop consisted of lectures on “Planning and analyzing controlled pedestrian experiments” and “Extraction of trajectories with help of PeTrack” by Alica Kandler and Maik Boltes from Forschungszentrum Jülich. These theoretical tutorials were directly linked to afternoon practical sessions in PC labs, during which the participants had the option to acquire trajectory data by means of PeTrack or simple manual techniques, to obtain calibration data from the camera, and also to discuss various bureaucratic aspects of pedestrian experiments.

The organizers received very positive feedback regarding the practical focus of the workshop, with the main complaint being: “The practical part should not be for three hours, but rather for three days!”

Main Conference

The main conference from 10 to 12 September 2025 took place in the Atrium of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and adjacent lecture and seminar rooms, providing an open and well-connected place for meetings and discussions, not only during the two poster sessions.

Group photo in the Atrium. Unfortunately, some participants are missing due to discussions after a wonderful keynote.

Every day started with a keynote session: Maik Boltes summarized the journey towards precise data acquisition from pedestrian experiments (related to the workshop); He Wang focused on AI and deep-learning methods rising in pedestrian dynamics research (two parallel sessions were dedicated to machine learning and AI); and Simo Hostikka reminded the audience of the fire safety engineering origin of the field by talking about the coupling of fire and evacuation models.

Parallel sessions were mostly divided (as is standard at PED) into a track on the analysis of pedestrian data (experimental or real-world) and a track on modelling and simulations. However, a high number of contributions combined both approaches, which is great for pursuing the common research goal. A significant portion of the contributions focused on crowd management and behavioural aspects of pedestrian dynamics, demonstrating the high interdisciplinarity of the PED conferences.

Thanks to the supporting technical staff, all presentations were streamed and recorded to allow community members who could not attend to stay partially connected.

Social Events

In addition to the opening and closing social gatherings, the conference programme was enriched by two main social events: a concert of the Academic Orchestra of the Czech Technical University in Prague in the Bethlehem Chapel, and the conference dinner in the brewery of the Strahov Monastery. The organizers deliberately let the participants get to the social event venues on their own via public transport (the best way to travel around Prague), which turned out to be a good occasion to explore the city.

Closing Words

The 13th PED conference will be hosted by Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 2027.

Now, three years after being given the opportunity to host PED, and almost one year after the conference, the journey for us as organizers ends with the publication of the proceedings in Acta Polytechnica CTU Proceedings — 42 papers, open access — and the writing of this report. We believe that thanks to the PED community, the valuable contributions, and the nice atmosphere among the participants, PED 2025 became a great and memorable event.

By: Pavel Hrabák, Hana Najmanová, Jana Vacková

Edited by: Mohcine Chraibi

PTED 2024

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Workshop on Pedestrian Traffic and Evacuation Dynamics 2024

The 5th Workshop on Pedestrian Traffic and Evacuation Dynamics (2024) was held in Hefei, Anhui Province in China from December 13th to 15th. It was organized by Prof. Weiguo Song and Prof. Jun Zhang from the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science of University of Science and Technology of China and the National & Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Thermal Safety Technology to discuss new theories, new methods, new technologies and the trends in the research of pedestrian traffic and evacuation dynamics.

Group photo of the workshop.

Participants

110 scholars from 40 institutions including the University of Melbourne, Tsinghua University, Chongqing University, University of Science and Technology of China, Beijing Jiaotong University, Sun Yat-sen University, Wuhan University of Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai Maritime University, Jiangsu University, Fuzhou University, Nanjing University of Technology, Beihang University, University of Tokyo, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and City University of Hong Kong participated.

Participants and inaugural opening speech by Prof. Song.

Talks

Prof. Majid Sarvi from the University of Melbourne in Australia, Prof. Zhou Tiejun from Chongqing University, and Prof. Chen Tao from Tsinghua University gave Plenary speeches at the workshop. Prof. Han Xiao from Beijing Jiaotong University, Associate Prof. Cao Shuchao from Jiangsu University, Associate Prof. Xiao Yao from Sun Yat-sen University, Prof. Fu Ming from the Hefei Institute of Public Safety at Tsinghua University, and Associate Prof. Xie Qimiao from Shanghai Maritime University delivered keynote speeches. They shared the latest progress in experimental research, modeling, and application of new technologies in pedestrian traffic and emergency evacuation and provided prospects for the future development of this field.

Besides, 33 experts and scholars gave wonderful oral presentations. The attendees had in-depth exchanges and discussions on topics such as mixed traffic dynamics, pedestrian evacuation under disaster conditions, personnel safety protection technology, virtual reality technology, and personnel psychology. They shared their latest research results, experiences, and viewpoints, and actively explored new research directions and solutions. The open and interactive environment provides valuable learning and communication opportunities for participants, promoting the collision of ideas and academic progress in various research directions.

QA-session and moderation by Prof. Zhang.

During the workshop, some of the researchers visited the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science and watched the fire whirlwind demonstration, and learned about the development of the institute and its research achievements in fire science and emergency evacuation.

Looking ahead

The 6th Workshop on Pedestrian Traffic and Evacuation Dynamics (2025) is set to convene next year again at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. The exact date has not yet been set but will be announced soon.

By: Jun Zhang

Edited by: Mohcine Chraibi

Traffic and Granular Flow 2024

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The 15th edition of the Traffic and Granular Flow (TGF24) conference took place from December 2nd to 5th, 2024, in the beautiful city of Lyon, France. Held at the historic Palais Hirsch and the equally magnificent Palais de la Bourse, the conference offered an inspiring setting along the Rhône River.

Emergence of behavioral repertoires in entrance situations: Interplay between physical, collective and inter-personal factors - Tom Postmes

Since its inception in 1995, TGF has been a biennial event that brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary audience, including experts in physics, computer science, engineering, and fields such as pedestrian dynamics, granular flows, collective animal behavior, and urban mobility. This year’s conference continued the tradition of fostering collaboration and innovation by presenting the latest developments and ideas in these areas.

The scope of TGF covered a wide range of topics, including:

Internet traffic and cyber systems,
Pedestrian and evacuation dynamics,
Urban Mobility,
Trafic,
Collective animal behavior,
Swarm behavior, and
Collective dynamics of biological systems.

Researchers from across the globe—spanning the USA, UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, India, and more—gathered to share their work and form new collaborations, which were facilitated by the smooth organization offering plenty of time for discussions between the partecipants. A particular highlight was the keynote by Andreas Schadschneider, who delivered a retrospective on nearly 30 years of TGF, celebrating its role in connecting scientists across disciplines and continents. Andreas explained how the conference started from a small group of physicists in Germany interested in traffic from a physical perspective and evolved into the global community studying a variety of subjects as it is today.

TGF Conference Series: A retrospective by Andreas Schadschneider

Another memorable presentation was by Ernesto Altshuler, whose talk, From Vortices to People: An Experimental Approach to Traffic, captivated the audience. Ernesto showed, through beautiful videos and funny anecdotes, how systems of different sizes show properties related to traffic systems and concluded his presentation showing some puzzling experiments on collective motion of people.

The conference also featured impactful contributions from attendees. For instance, Paul Geoerg and his co-authors presented their research on Mapping Crowd Safety Risks at a Global Scale, which introduced a meticulously curated database of 1,780 crowd-related events from 2000 to 2025. This database tracks incidents such as crowd crushes, terror attacks, and cancellations due to extreme weather, providing valuable insights for safety planning and risk assessment.

During the conference there was also the opportunity to showcase various software that have been created to help researchers working in the community. For instance, Peter Thompson presented a tool intended to visualize results from simulation or experiment in 3D to help gaining a more multi-facet inside into collected data. Ahmed Alia presented a comparison of Deep Learning-based Computer Vision tools used to track people’s heads in videos, a kind of software that is increasingly used by a variety of researchers to collect data on crowds.

In her invited talk Marta Gonzalez discussed traffic from a macroscopic perspective focusing on mobility patterns of people through data collected on mobile phones. Marta provided an overview of her impressive career presenting a number of graphs in videos in an informative way. On a smaller scale Xiaolu Jia presented a method to obtain origin-destination data of people moving inside a train station in Tokyo (Japan).

The conference also included a large number of presentations on pedestrian dynamics, vehicular traffic, collective animal behavior, network theory, and also some touching aspects closer to psychology.

Impressions and Atmosphere

TGF is renowned not only for its academic depth but also for its welcoming and collaborative environment. The informal atmosphere encourages open dialogue, making it easy for participants to engage in meaningful discussions regardless of their gender, nationality, or professional position. First-time attendees often remark on the strong sense of community and the openness to new ideas. Although TGF is held biannually, some participants also meed during the PED conference sharing some of the topics but specifically focused on pedestrian traffic.

This inclusivity has been a hallmark of TGF, thanks to the efforts of long-standing contributors like Andreas Schadschneider and Armin Seyfried, who have nurtured this culture over the years. Once again, the conference attracted a wide range of scientists from around the world, with a remarkable balance of ages and genders. Such diversity and openness ensure that the value of the content takes precedence over status.

Although the famous festival of lights was not part of the official program of the conference, many participants took the chance to enjoy the light show in a crowded scene. Probably given the crowd researchers in the conference a more realistic feeling for high densities.

Festival of lights, Lyon 2024.

Looking Ahead

As the conference came to a close, the steering committee announced that the next edition, TGF26, will be hosted by Nikolai Bode at Bristol University. With its strong foundation of inclusivity and innovation, TGF is set to continue thriving as a platform for cutting-edge research and collaboration. TGF26 is planning to continue the multidisciplinary tradition of TGF and will further extent its coverage to include also robotics, which is increasigly playing an important role in traffic through automated vehicles and swarm robotics. Of course, content from more “classical” topics typical of the past editions of TGF will be also welcome.

By: Ahmed Alia, Thomas Chatagnon, Claudio Feliciani

Edited by: Mohcine Chraibi

IBIT Conference 2023

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The 9th IBIT Conference on Crowdmanagement & Event Safety Management took place in Cologne in November. Related to the slogan “Knowledge, Network, Responsibility”, current challenges, basic knowledge, best practices and research activities were reported and discussed over two days.

Venue of the IBIT Conference: RheinEnergieSTADION in Cologne

Sabine Funk and her IBIT team put together a comprehensive program that included the following topics, among others:

Cooperation and communication during events
Inclusion of people with disabilities
Technical support for event safety (e.g. simulations, AI and drones)
Last mile / Zone Ex from different perspectives (legal, operational, …)
Best practice examples for e.g. specific safety concepts and managing threat situations

Most contributions and discussions were in German - although the English track is growing. On the 2nd day of the conference there was an international track presented by the YES Group, in which, among other things, the lessons learned from the Loveparade were discussed.

In addition to presentation and discussion panels, the exhibition area offered the opportunity to get in touch with various companies, institutes and organizations active in the field of event safety and to discuss crowd management strategies using this vivid model as an example:

New approach for modeling crowds at major events ;)

As a part of the side program, the topic “Knowledge transfer from research to practice and vice versa” was highlighted in an open discussion round. Barriers to transfer were collected, such as the lack of a common vocabulary, lack of detailed understanding of each other’s activities and different time scales of research/practice. While the list of challenges grew longer as the discussion progressed, there were only a few proposed solutions - such as the preparation of scientific publications for specific target groups from practice. The discussion showed that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of transfer. However, the conference with its established research track is already an effective platform for advancing the exchange between research and practice.

The IBIT conference will take place again next year. The exact date and location have not yet been set but will be announced here.

By: Jette Degenhardt

IAFSS Symposium 2023

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The International Association for Fire Safety Science organized a Symposium in Tsukuba, Japan during October 2023. This week-long symposium included a track on human behaviour in fire and evacuation and a dedicated workshop on the topic which took place the Sunday before the conference. The Sunday workshop included a set of presentations and discussions related to the ongoing work of the permanent group on human behaviour in fires led by Enrico Ronchi and Erica Kuligowski. This included the arrangement of a webinar series and the development of a research agenda for the field. Several important discussion points were brought up, including the need for training opportunities for early career researchers and a specific event entirely dedicated to the field.

During the symposium, three sessions were dedicated to evacuation along with two keynote talks. The conference was opened by a tribute to Rita Fahy by the chair of IAFSS, Brian Meacham, Erica Kuligowski and Daniel Nilsson. Rita was a pioneer of the field of evacuation modelling with her model Exit89 which was developed in the 80ies and has been used for the investigation of the World Trade Centre performed by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Rita passed away during summer 2023, leaving a strong impact on the human behaviour in fire community with her work on the panic misconception, evacuation simulations and quantification of evacuation behaviour for fire engineering applications. The tribute was followed by the Howard Emmons award-winning talk by David Purser focused on understanding evacuation behaviour in presence of smoke and toxic gases.

Exploring single-line walking in immersive virtual reality by Luke de Schot.

The talk gave a comprehensive overview on the research in the domain providing valuable insights into the state-of-the-art of fire evacuation behaviour. The second keynote of the symposium was also on the topic of evacuation and was given by Yuki Akizuki. The focus of Akizuki’s talk was evacuation route design considering the impact of reduced visibility conditions due to smoke. Presentations during the symposium included three sessions on evacuation and human behaviour in fire and were chaired by Enrico Ronchi, Rosaria Ono and Daniel Nilsson. They included a wide range of topics, such as the use of novel methods to collect pedestrian movement and evacuation behaviour data (e.g., VR and online experiments), exploration of laypeople knowledge of evacuation, design of evacuation signage and way-finding systems, and evacuation of vulnerable groups such as children and people with functional limitations.

Sheldon Tieszen Student Awards (Foto by Peter Thompson).

On the Friday after the Symposium, a group of approximately 15 researchers interested in evacuation behaviour gathered in an informal meeting arranged at the University of Tokyo by Claudio Feliciani. This was a valuable opportunity to discuss collaborative efforts in the field and share experiences concerning pedestrian and evacuation data collection and modelling activities. All in all, the IAFSS Symposium and its related activities have been a fantastic opportunity for the evacuation community to meet and learn from each other research efforts in the field.

The 15th IAFSS International Symposium is set to convene in 2026 at the scenic locale of La Rochelle, France. This event promises to continue the esteemed tradition of fostering dialogue and sharing groundbreaking research in the field of fire safety science.

By: Enrico Ronchi

Edited by: Mohcine Chraibi