We consider a kinetic theory approach to model the evacuation of a crowd from bounded domains. The interactions of a person with other pedestrians and the environment, which includes walls, exits, and obstacles, are modeled by using tools of game theory and are transferred to the crowd dynamics. The model allows to weight between two competing behaviors: the search for less congested areas and the tendency to follow the stream unconsciously in a panic situation. For the numerical approximation of the solution to our model, we apply an operator splitting scheme which breaks the problem into two pure advection problems and a problem involving the interactions. We compare our numerical results against the data reported in a recent empirical study on evacuation from a room with two exits. For medium and medium-to-large groups of people we achieve good agreement between the computed average people density and flow rate and the respective measured quantities. Through a series of numerical tests we also show that our approach is capable of handling evacuation from a room with one or more exits with variable size, with and without obstacles, and can reproduce lane formation in bidirectional flow in a corridor.

This work introduces a novel approach for data-driven model reduction of time-dependent parametric partial differential equations. Using a multi-step procedure consisting of proper orthogonal decomposition, dynamic mode decomposition, and manifold interpolation, the proposed approach allows to accurately recover field solutions from a few large-scale simulations. Numerical experiments for the Rayleigh-Bénard cavity problem show the effectiveness of such multi-step procedure in two parametric regimes, i.e., medium and high Grashof number. The latter regime is particularly challenging as it nears the onset of turbulent and chaotic behavior. A major advantage of the proposed method in the context of time-periodic solutions is the ability to recover frequencies that are not present in the sampled data.