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

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.