Panic on the computer

A 3D computational model under development by an Arizona State University geographer incorporates patterns of human behaviour and movement and could be useful in helping city planners understand our conduct in crowded cities.

Clearly it’s impractical to conduct live experiments with hundreds or thousands of people along busy streetscapes, or to reproduce mob behaviour during riots for the purposes of academic experimentation!

So Paul M. Torrens, an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University, is developing a computer model that can be used to assist city planners, shopping centre developers, public safety and health officials, and researchers in exploring the dynamics of individual pedestrian and crowd behaviour in dense urban settings.

‘The idea is to use the model to test hypotheses, real world plans and strategies that are not very easy or are impossible to test in practice,’ Torrens said.

Current ways of measuring behaviour that use statistical analysis or physics models have not proven to have the veracity that this model could potentially have, according to Torrens.