Paper: How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters

Mehdi Moussaïd, Dirk Helbing, and Guy Theraulaz. How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters (2011). Social Sciences - Psychological and Cognitive Sciences - Physical Sciences - Applied Physical Sciences: NAS 2011 108 (17) 6884-6888; published ahead of print April 18, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1016507

In this paper, a cognitive science approach is proposed, which is based on behavioral heuristics. The authors suggest that, guided by visual information, namely the distance of obstructions in candidate lines of sight, pedestrians apply two simple cognitive procedures to adapt their walking speeds and directions.

Their model predicts the emergence of self-organization phenomena, such as the spontaneous formation of unidirectional lanes or stop-and-go waves.