We describe here formal analogies between the Darcy equations, that describe the flow of a viscous fluid in a porous medium, and some problems arising from the handing of congestion in crowd motion models.
At the microscopic level, individuals are identified to rigid discs, and the dual handling of the non overlapping constraint leads to discrete Darcy-like equations with a unilateral constraint that involves the velocities and interaction pressures, and that are set on the contact network. At the macroscopic level, a similar problem is obtained, that is set on the congested zone.
We emphasize the differences between the two settings: at the macroscopic level, a straight use of the maximum principle shows that congestion actually favors evacuation, which is in contradiction with experimental evidence. On the contrary, in the microscopic setting, the very particular structure of the discrete differential operators makes it possible to reproduce observed "Stop and Go waves", and the so called "Faster is Slower" effect.[-]