Agent-Based Simulation of Traffic Jams, Crowds, and Supply Networks Reality, Simulation, and Design of Intelligent Infrastructures

Human behavior is normally very hard to describe, as the relevant variables are difficult to identify, to quantify, and to measure. However, scientists have recently discovered several natural constants and laws in pedestrian crowds and vehicle traffic, starting from propagation velocities of traffic jams and Mexican waves, over human trail formation, scaling laws in traveller behavior, interaction forces of car drivers, up to recurrent congestion patterns. Some observed phenomena have very strange, even counter-intuitive properties which can only be understood by means of non-linear interactions.