Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2008

Proper management of evacuation processes is one of the basic requirements within life safety concepts, and it helps to prevent critical situations from getting out of control. Super high-rise buildings, deep underground stations or shopping areas, airplanes for the mass transportation, sport stadiums or meeting places with tens of thousands of visitors-they all call for new dim- sionsinsafeevacuationplanning. Researchresultsinevacuationdynamicsgive answers to these challenges. PED-conferences are the prime address for all research in this ?eld. The increasing number of participants from di?erent ?elds of research re?ect theirimportance. AfterPED-conferencesinGermany(Duisburg,2001), Great Britain (Greenwich, 2003) and Austria (Vienna, 2005), the PED 2008 C- ference in Wuppertal/Germany reached new heights with more than 120 p- ticipants from 20 countries and nearly 100 presentations. The wide ?eld of topics discussed in presentations also re?ects deeper understanding of fun- mental e?ects as well as the stronger interactions between di?erent research areas. New test designs o?er new important basic data, new analysis pro- dures open a better understanding of complex interactions, new model - signs allow more realistic simulations, and the input from architectural - sign and the medical references on physical limitations help to realize a safe evacuation design. On the one hand all these data give an outlook of future possibilities and sometimes they open an astonishing new understanding of seemingly well-known data. On the other hand, they make clear the limi- tions of our current knowledge.