Free to move or trapped in your group: Mathematical modeling of information overload and coordination in crowded populations
We present modeling strategies that describe the motion and interaction of groups of pedestrians in obscured spaces.We start off with an approach based on balance equations in terms of measures and then we exploit the descriptive power of a probabilistic cellular automaton model. Based on a variation of the simple symmetric random walk on the square lattice, we test the interplay between population size and an interpersonal attraction parameter for the evacuation of confined and darkened spaces.