Crowd and Pedestrian Dynamics: Empirical Investigation and Simulation

The investigation of crowd dynamics is a complex field of study, which involves different types of knowledge and skills. From the socio-psychological perspective the definition of crowd is still controversial. For this reason, we propose to analytically investigate this topic focusing on pedestrian dynamics in high-density situation. In this paper we propose a multi-disciplinary approach, which is based on observations and experimental procedures focused on proxemic behaviour of walking groups, and Multi-Agent Systems, which are useful technique to simulate what-if scenarios. The methodological approach that we propose can be synthetically represented as composed of research in vivo (observations), in vitro (experimental procedures) and in silicon (modeling and simulations).