The flow of human crowds

Abstract

The modern study of a crowd as a flowing continuum is a recent development. Distinct from a classical fluid because of the property that a crowd has the capacity to think, interesting new physical ideas are involved in its study. An appealing property of a crowd in motion is that the nonlinear, time-dependent, simultaneous equations representing a crowd are conformably mappable. This property makes many interesting applications analytically tractable. In this review examples are given in which the theory has been used to provide possible assistance in the annual Muslim Hajj, to understand the Battle of Agincourt, and, surprisingly, to locate barriers that actually increase the flow of pedest..