Pico-Scale Ideas for People-Scale Problems: Leveraging Molecular Simulation Tools for the Modeling of Urban Systems

Techniques from computational science, especially particle-based methods for molecular simulation, have played an enormous role in understanding the physics of amorphous matter. In such simulations, the particles that are amorphously arranged may represent atoms or (in appropriately coarse-grained simulations) molecular/macromolecular-scale entities. In this talk, we discuss the power of adapting molecular simulation tools to model amorphous "materials" at the scale of urban phenomena, namely, at the scale of crowds (with particles representing pedestrians) or even at the scale of cities (with particles representing buildings). We argue that the fields of pedestrian dynamics and urban-systems modeling could benefit to a significant extent from this interdisciplinary approach, by leveraging, e.g., the computationally efficient solvers and the descriptors for spatiotemporal correlation popularized by the molecular-simulation community. We provide several representative examples in support of this premise, and close by highlighting future opportunities for synergistic growth between these two communities.