Pedestrians are able to anticipate, which gives them an edge in avoiding collisions and navigating in cluttered spaces. However, these capabilities are impaired by digital distraction through smartphones, a growing safety concern. To capture these features, we put forward a continuous agent-based model (dubbed ANDA) hinging on a transparent delineation of a decision-making process, wherein a desired velocity is selected as the optimum of a perceived cost, and a mechanical layer that handles contacts and collisions. Altogether, the model includes less than a dozen parameters, many of which are fit using independent experimental data. The versatility of ANDA is demonstrated by numerical simulations that successfully replicate empirical observations in a very wide range of scenarios. These scenarios vary from collision avoidance involving one, two, or more agents, to collective flow properties in unidirectional and bidirectional settings, and to the dynamics of evacuation through a bottleneck, where contact forces are directly accessible. Remarkably, the model is able to replicate the enhanced chaoticity of the flow observed experimentally in ¿smartphone-walking¿ pedestrians, by reducing the frequency of decisional updates, replicating the digital distraction effect. The conceptual transparency of the model makes it easy to pinpoint the origin of its current limitations and to clarify the singular position of pedestrian crowds amid active-matter systems.

The local navigation of pedestrians is assumed to involve no anticipation beyond the most imminent collisions, in most models. These typically fail to reproduce some key features experimentally evidenced in dense crowds crossed by an intruder, namely, transverse displacements toward regions of higher density due to the anticipation of the intruder's crossing. We introduce a minimal model based on mean-field games, emulating agents planning out a global strategy that minimizes their overall discomfort. By solving the problem in the permanent regime thanks to an elegant analogy with the nonlinear Schrodinger's equation, we are able to identify the two main variables governing the model's behavior and to exhaustively investigate its phase diagram. We find that, compared to some prominent microscopic approaches, the model is remarkably successful in replicating the experimental observations associated with the intruder experiment. In addition, the model can capture other daily-life situations such as partial metro boarding.

We present experimental results of pedestrian evacuations through a narrow door under a prescribed safety distancing of either 1.5 or 2 meters. In this situation, flow rate augments with pedestrian velocity due to a complete absence of flow interruptions or clogs. Accordingly, the evacuation improves when the prescribed physical distance is reduced, as this implies shortening the time lapses between the exit of consecutive pedestrians. In addition, the analysis of pedestrian trajectories reveals that the distance to the first neighbor in the evacuation process is rather similar to the one obtained when pedestrians were just roaming within the arena, hence suggesting that this magnitude depends more on the crowd state (desired speed, prescribed safety distance, etc.) than on the geometry where the pedestrian flow takes place. Also, an important difference in pedestrian behavior is observed when people are asked to walk at different speeds: whereas slow pedestrians evidence a clear preference for stop-and-go motion, fast walkers display detouring and stop-and-go behavior roughly in the same proportion.

The emergence of coherent vortices has been observed in a wide variety of many-body systems such as animal flocks, bacteria, colloids, vibrated granular materials or human crowds. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that pedestrians roaming within an enclosure also form vortex-like patterns which, intriguingly, only rotate counterclockwise. By implementing simple numerical simulations, we evidence that the development of swirls in many-particle systems can be described as a phase transition in which both the density of agents and their dissipative interactions with the boundaries play a determinant role. Also, for the specific case of pedestrians, we show that the preference of right-handed people (the majority in our experiments) to turn leftwards when facing a wall is the symmetry breaking mechanism needed to trigger the global counterclockwise rotation observed.

We report experimental results of the speed-density relation emerging in pedestrian dynamics when individuals keep a prescribed safety distance among them. To this end, we characterize the movement of a group of people roaming inside an enclosure varying different experimental parameters: (i) global density, (ii) prescribed walking speed, and (iii) suggested safety distance. Then, by means of the Voronoi diagram we are able to compute the local density associated to each pedestrian, which is afterward correlated with its corresponding velocity at each time. In this way, we discover a strong dependence of the speed-density relation on the experimental conditions, especially with the (prescribed) free speed. We also observe that when pedestrians walk slowly, the speed-density relation depends on the global macroscopic density of the system, and not only on the local one. Finally, we demonstrate that for the same experiment, each pedestrian follows a distinct behavior, thus giving rise to multiple speed-density curves.

With people trying to keep a safe distance from others due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the way in which pedestrians walk has completely changed since the pandemic broke out1,2. In this work, laboratory experiments demonstrate the effect of several variables-such as the pedestrian density, the walking speed and the prescribed safety distance-on the interpersonal distance established when people move within relatively dense crowds. Notably, we observe that the density should not be higher than 0.16 pedestrians per square meter (around 6 m2 per pedestrian) in order to guarantee an interpersonal distance of 1 m. Although the extrapolation of our findings to other more realistic scenarios is not straightforward, they can be used as a first approach to establish density restrictions in urban and architectonic spaces based on scientific evidence.

We report experimental measurements obtained during the evacuation of 180 soldiers through a narrow door. Several conditions are analyzed in the evacuation drills, such as the degree of competitiveness (from rush to shove) and the influence of an obstacle placed before the exit. From the data, we compute the flow rate through the door and the velocity and density fields, as well as a map of the local evacuation time. We also present novel results on the pressure that the individuals exert on the wall adjacent to the door. Our study challenges the idea that an obstacle could be beneficial for pedestrian evacuations because of a hypothetical alleviation of pressure at the door. At the same time, we discover a correlation among the largest pressure peaks and the development of clogging.

We explore the role that the obstacle position plays in the evacuation time of agents when leaving a room. To this end, we simulate a system of nonsymmetric spherocylinders that have a prescribed desired velocity and angular orientation. In this way, we reproduce the nonmonotonous dependence of the pedestrian flow rate on the obstacle distance to the door. For short distances, the obstacle delays the evacuation because the exit size is effectively reduced; i.e., the distance between the obstacle and the wall is smaller than the door width. By increasing the obstacle distance to the door, clogging is reduced leading to an optimal obstacle position (maximum flow rate) in agreement with results reported in numerical simulations of pedestrian evacuations and granular flows. For further locations, however, a counterintuitive behavior occurs as the flow rate values fall again below the one corresponding to the case without obstacle. Analyzing the head-times distribution, we evidence that this new feature is not linked to the formation of clogs, but is caused by a reduction of the efficiency of the agent's instantaneous flow rate when the exit is not blocked.

Radiotherapy can be synergistically combined with immunotherapy in mouse models, extending its efficacious effects outside of the irradiated field (abscopal effects). We previously reported that a regimen encompassing local radiotherapy in combination with anti-CD137 plus anti-PD-1 mAbs achieves potent abscopal effects against syngeneic transplanted murine tumors up to a certain tumor size. Knowing that TGF beta expression or activation increases in irradiated tissues, we tested whether TGF beta blockade may further enhance abscopal effects in conjunction with the anti-PD-1 plus anti-CD137 mAb combination. Indeed, TGF beta blockade with 1D11, a TGF beta-neutralizing mAb, markedly enhanced abscopal effects and overall treatment efficacy against subcutaneous tumors of either 4T1 breast cancer cells or large MC38 colorectal tumors. Increases in CD8 T cells infiltrating the nonirradiated lesion were documented upon combined treatment, which intensely expressed Granzyme-B as an indicator of cytotoxic effector capability. Interestingly, tumor tissue but not healthy tissue irradiation results in the presence of higher concentrations of TGF beta in the nonirradiated contralateral tumor that showed smad2/3 phosphorylation increases in infiltrating CD8 T cells. In conclusion, radiotherapy-induced TGF beta hampers abscopal efficacy even upon combination with a potent immunotherapy regimen. Therefore, TGF beta blockade in combination with radioimmunotherapy results in greater efficacy.