Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2025
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