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.

Experiment and Evacuation.- The UK WTC9/11 Evacuation Study: An Overview of the Methodologies Employed and Some Preliminary Analysis.- Evacuation Movement in Photoluminescent Stairwells.- Automatic Extraction of Pedestrian Trajectories from Video Recordings.- Stairwell Evacuation from Buildings: What We Know We Don't Know.- Evacuation of a High Floor Metro Train in a Tunnel Situation: Experimental Findings.- Using Laser Scanner Data to Calibrate Certain Aspects of Microscopic Pedestrian Motion Models.- Pedestrian Vision and Collision Avoidance Behavior: Investigation of the Information Process Space of Pedestrians Using an Eye Tracker.- FDS+Evac: An Agent Based Fire Evacuation Model.- Comparisons of Evacuation Efficiency and Pre-travel Activity Times in Response to a Sounder and Two Different Voice Alarm Messages.- Design of Voice Alarms-the Benefit of Mentioning Fire and the Use of a Synthetic Voice.- Enhanced Empirical Data for the Fundamental Diagram and the Flow Through Bottlenecks.- Parameters of Pedestrian Flow for Modeling Purposes.- Emergency Preparedness in the Case of a Tsunami-Evacuation Analysis and Traffic Optimization for the Indonesian City of Padang.- Case Studies on Evacuation Behaviour in a Hotel Building in BART and in Real Life.- Analysis of Empirical Trajectory Data of Pedestrians.- Model-Based Real-Time Estimation of Building Occupancy During Emergency Egress.- Experiments on Evacuation Dynamics for Different Classes of Situations.- Prediction and Mitigation of Crush Conditions in Emergency Evacuations.- Start Waves and Pedestrian Movement- An Experimental Study.- Clearance Time for Pedestrian Crossing.- Ship Evacuation-Guidelines, Simulation, Validation, and Acceptance Criteria.- Empirical Study of Pedestrians' Characteristics at Bottlenecks.- RFID Technology Applied for Validation of an Office Simulation Model.- Study on Crowd Flow Outside a Hall via Considering Velocity Distribution of Pedestrians.- Analysis on the Propagation Speed of Pedestrian Reaction: Velocity of Starting Wave and Stopping Wave.- Simulation and Modelling.- Toward Smooth Movement of Crowds.- Modeling Evacuees' Exit Selection with Best Response Dynamics.- Front-to-Back Communication in a Microscopic Crowd Model.- Comparison of Various Methods for the Calculation of the Distance Potential Field.- Agent-Based Simulation of Evacuation: An Office Building Case Study.- A Genetic Algorithm Module for Spatial Optimization in Pedestrian Simulation.- Opinion Formation and Propagation Induced by Pedestrian Flow.- Passenger Dynamics at Airport Terminal Environment.- Application Modes of Egress Simulation.- Investigating the Impact of Aircraft Exit Availability on Egress Time Using Computer Simulation.- Bounded Rationality Choice Model Incorporating Attribute Threshold, Mental Effort, and Risk Attitude: Illustration to Pedestrian Walking Direction Choice Decision in Shopping Streets.- A SCA-Based Model for Open Crowd Aggregation.- Hardware Implementation of a Crowd Evacuation Model Based on Cellular Automata.- Applying a Discrete Event System Approach to Problems of Collective Motion in Emergency Situations.- SIMULEM: Introducing Goal Oriented Behaviours in Crowd Simulation.- Conflicts at an Exit in Pedestrian Dynamics.- Improving Pedestrian Dynamics Modeling Using Fuzzy Logic.- Modeling the Link Volume Counts as a Function of Temporally Dependent OD-Flows.- Effect of Subconscious Behavior on Pedestrian Counterflow in a Lattice Gas Model Under Open Boundary Conditions.- Hand-Calculation Methods for Evacuation Calculation-Last Chance for an Old-Fashioned Approach or a Real Alternative to Microscopic Simulation Tools?.- Adding Higher Intelligent Functions to Pedestrian Agent Model.- "FlowTech" and "EvaTech" Two Computer-Simulation Methods for Evacuation Calculation.- Large Scale Microscopic Evacuation Simulation.- Numerical Optimisation Techniques Applied to Evacuation Analysis.- A Multi-Method Approach to the Interpretation of Pedestrian Spa