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.