Stabilizing the psychological dynamics of people in a queue

This work is part of an ongoing investigation aimed at applying the tools of control theory to gain a deeper understanding of crowd psychology and ultimately to control the relevant psychological dynamics. The present treatment investigates an approach to stabilize a queue, that is, a one-dimensional crowd structure. We pursue the problem in which an authoritative figure, termed a control agent, issues signals that propagate through the queue to drive specific components of the queue's state to zero. Simulations confirm that the control strategy performs admirably in ideal conditions; however, in the presence of system noise, performance deteriorates dramatically as the queue length increases.