The Workshop on Pedestrian Traffic and Evacuation Dynamics 2021 was held successfully on October 30th-31th, 2021 in Hefei, China, hosted by the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Eight experts and scholars in the field of pedestrian dynamics research at home and abroad were invited to give invitedtalks.
Due to the special period of epidemic prevention and control, the meeting adopted a combination of online and offline way. The meeting had a total of 8 invited reports including 2 online reports.
It was a successful conference, gathering more than 80 participants from 20 universities and institutes to exchange and discuss the latest theories, technologies and development trends in the field of pedestrian and evacuation dynamics.
Professor Weiguo Song, Chairman of the Workshop, University of Science and Technology of China, chaired the opening ceremony in the morning and introduced the experts and scholars attending the workshop. Prof. Peihong Zhang hosted later.
In the first part, Prof. Rui Jiang from Beijing Jiaotong University, Dr. Michael Kinsey from Arup, Shanghai, Prof. Jun Zhang from USTC and Jian Ma from Southwest Jiaotong University were invited to give speeches on Bicycle dynamics at bottlenecks, Cognitive biases, Vulnerable pedestrians and Pedestrian flows.
The second part of the workshop was chaired by Prof. Jun Zhang from USTC and Prof. Qingyi Hao from Anqing Normal University in the afternoon. Prof. Zhiming Fang from University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Prof. Jiancheng Long from Hefei University of Technology, Dr. Mohcine Chraibi from Research Centre Juelich in Germany, and Dr. Daichi Yanagisawa from the University of Tokyo gave invited speeches on Building evacuation, Vehicle routing problem, Fundamental Diagram and Pedestrians' body-rotation.
In the free Q&A session, the experts gave patient and meticulous answers to the questions raised by the participants, and the atmosphere of the whole meeting was relaxed and pleasant.
The meeting also set up a ‘round-table discussion’ session, and participants conducted in-depth exchanges and discussions on the opportunities and challenges in the pedestrian and evacuation field in the future. Finally, Prof. Weiguo Song summarized the meeting, expressed his sincere gratitude to the experts and scholars participating in the meeting, and put forward a beautiful vision of meeting again next time in Workshop.