A twelve-week track on how crowds move and how we measure that movement — microscopic models, the fundamental diagram, and the JuPedSim/PedPy toolchain on the lab's own simulation platform. The throughline: a simulation is only as good as its validation against reality.
The 12-week arc
2 of 12 lectures published — each a self-contained read with a slide deck and runnable workbook. Start at the first published week and work forward.
| Wk | Theme & focus | Read |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Why model crowds start here Safety, design, and sensing ground truth — what models are *for* | read → slides · workbook |
| 02 | The fundamental diagram Density–flow–speed: the field's core empirical law, read from data | read → slides · workbook |
| 03 | Microscopic models I: social force Pedestrians as particles under social and physical forces | planned |
| 04 | Microscopic models II Velocity-based models & cellular automata — trade-offs vs social force. Teach against the lab engine's reality: the agenda/from_floor path runs base CFSM (AVM only on directed_flow); parameters are wired and literature-grounded (radius 0.20 m Maury–Venel contact / Seyfried FD intercept, v0 1.34 m/s Weidmann, T 1.0 s = JuPedSim default ≈ 2× Seyfried b≈0.56 s = low-motivation regime, defensible but not "Seyfried-grounded"); single-v0 crowds symmetry-lock — per-agent draws are a modelling necessity | planned |
| 05 | JuPedSim scenarios Building and running a scenario on the simulation platform | planned |
| 06 | PedPy measurement Extracting density, speed, and flow from trajectories | planned |
| 07 | Voronoi density & the method trap How the measurement method changes the density you report | planned |
| 08 | Bottlenecks & the multi-room collapse Doorways, capacity, and the onset of congestion | planned |
| 09 | Evacuation dynamics Egress time, exit choice, and where simple models fail | planned |
| 10 | Simulation as synthetic ground truth Coupling sims to sensing experiments for labelled data | planned |
| 11 | Validation against real trajectories Does the simulation match reality, and how would you know? | planned |
| 12 | Capstone A validated evacuation study with PedPy metrics | planned |
Capstone
Week 12: design an evacuation scenario, simulate it, measure it with PedPy, and validate the result against a real or reference trajectory dataset — reporting where simulation and reality diverge.