Pedestrian Flow Analysis

Pedestrian flow analysis measures and models how people move on foot through streets, plazas, transit stations and buildings, combining empirical counts with simulations of individual walking behaviour. It treats walking as a flow phenomenon — characterised by density, speed and volume — while also resolving the micro-scale decisions of individual pedestrians through agent-based and social-force models. Building on the social force model of Dirk Helbing and Péter Molnár (1995), the approach links observed gate counts and flow–density relationships to mechanistic simulations that can predict congestion, evacuation times and the effect of design changes before they are built.