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.[-]

This minicourse aims at providing tentative explanations of some specific phenomena observed in the motion of crowds, or more generally collections of living entities. The first lecture shall focus on the so-called Stop and Go Waves, which sometimes spontaneously emerge and persist in crowds in motion. We shall present a general class of dynamical systems which are likely to exhibit this type of instabilities, and emphasize the critical role of two basic ingredients: the asymmetry of interactions, and any sort of delay in the transmission of information through the network of entities. The second lecture will address the Capacity Drop Phenomenon (decrease of the flux though a bottleneck when the upstream density becomes too high), and the more paradoxical Faster is Slower Effect (in some regimes, attempts to go quicker may slow down the overall process). We shall in particular detail how an accurate description of the relative position of entities (at the microscopic level) is crucial to recover and understand those effects.[-]