Pedestrian dynamics

Pedestrians can be included in the category of activesubject , a special case of granular media in which particles are self-propelled. Obviously, only some aspects of human behavior can be explained by this paradigm. In this line of research we try to better understand the bottleneck of a flow of people exiting through a door. In a panicked status , the results can be fatal. It is possible that some strategies specifically designed to alleviate bottlenecks in inert grains may prove useful in the case of people.

To this end, we carried out several series of experiments. One of them was carried out with a flock of sheep on a farm in Cubel (Zaragoza). The farmer, T. Yagüe, turned on the camera that we fixed on the door of his barn every morning when the sheep came in to eat. The analysis of the passage of the sheep through the door allowed us to establish many similarities with the granular media. Subsequently, we have carried out evacuation drills with students of the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra, and with soldiers of the America 66 regiment (Aizoáin, Navarra). The study of exit times, speed and pressure should help us to better understand the process and perhaps find ways to reduce the likelihood of door jamming.

For more information, please visit

• Pedestrian collective motion in competitive room evacuation

• Effect of obstacle position in the flow of sheep through a narow door (.pdf)

• Flow of pedestrians through narrow doors with different competitiveness (.pdf)

• The universality of traffic jams

• Experimental proof of faster-is-slower in systems of frictional particles flowing through constrictions (.pdf)

• Flow and clogging of a sheep herd passing through a bottleneck (.pdf)

• Clogging transition of many-particle systems flowing through bottlenecks

• Experimental evidence of the 'Faster Is Slower' effect (.pdf)

• Youtube videos (from Granular Lab channel)