Wenhan Wu

Personal Profile

My name is Wenhan Wu, I have a background in engineering, crowd dynamics, and collective behavior. I received the Bachelor’s degree in engineering from the School of Automation, Central South University, Changsha, China, in June 2019, and the PhD degree in engineering from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in December 2024. From April 2023 to April 2024, I was a joint PhD student at the Institute for Theoretical Biology, Department of Biology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. During my PhD, I used field observations, controlled experiments, data analysis, network science, modeling and simulations to study human collective behavior across scales, particularly in emergency situations. In addition, I also collaborated closely with Pawel Romanczuk’s lab and Guy Theraulaz’s lab, where I gained experience in studying collective animal behaviors from the perspective of collective information processing and data-driven modeling. From March 2025, I am going to join Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow, and I will conduct independent research related to urban mobility in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Research Interests

Reconstructing the structure of complex networks: Based on evolutionary game dynamics, compressive sensing technology was used to recover the network structure from a small amount of observed data through sparse search or greedy algorithms in the assumption that the unknown signal is sufficiently sparse on a specific basis.
(2018-2019, Bachelor Thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Keke Huang)
Human subgroups in pedestrian and evacuation dynamics: Based on data collection, law exploration, modeling and simulation, and empirical analysis, a systematic study was conducted on subgroups in pedestrian and evacuation dynamics, which includes simulating the evacuation process of heterogenous individuals, developing an intelligent method to identify subgroups automatically, modeling the motion behavior of subgroups in normal and emergency situations, and exploring the decision-making and behavior of subgroups when facing a static obstacle.
(2019-2024, PhD Thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoping Zheng)
Behavioral contagion of escape cascades in fish groups: Going beyond the assumption of time-scale separation principle, a spatially-explicit, agent-based model was proposed for the coupling between behavioral contagion and individual movement to explore the impact of movement parameters (startle speed, initial directionality, directional noise) on behavioral cascades.
(2023-2024, Joint PhD research, under the supervision of Prof. Pawel Romanczuk)
Random walk in human collective behavior: The self-organization of random walk of pedestrian groups in a circular corridor was analyzed, a simplified pedestrian model was developed to generate a series of simulation data under conditions similar to the experiment, and then statistical methods were used to analyze the distribution of data generated by numerical simulations.
(Since 2022, Collaborative research, under the supervision of Prof. Guy Theraulaz and Prof. Clément Sire)

Education Experience

[2015/09–2019/06] Bachelor of Engineering, School of Automation, Central South University, Changsha, China. Supervisor: Prof. Keke Huang
[2019/09–2024/12] Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Supervisor: Prof. Xiaoping Zheng
[2023/04–2024/04] Joint PhD Student in Collective Information Processing Lab, Department of Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Supervisor: Prof. Pawel Romanczuk

Research Articles (First & Co-first Author)

PRR

12. Escape cascades as a behavioral contagion process with adaptive network dynamics

Wenhan Wu^#, Xiaoping Zheng*, Pawel Romanczuk*

Physical Review Research, Accepted

Article Website PDF
IEEE TCSS

11. How Social Attributes Affect the Movement Process of Subgroups When Facing a Static Obstacle

Wenhan Wu^#, Wenfeng Yi, Erhui Wang, Xiaolu Wang, Xiaoping Zheng*

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2024, 1-13, Early Access Article.

Article Website PDF
IEEE TITS

10. A Vision-driven Model Based on Cognitive Heuristics for Simulating Subgroup Behaviors During Evacuation

Wenhan Wu^#, Wenfeng Yi, Xiaolu Wang, Xiaoping Zheng*

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2024, 25(11): 16048-16058.

Article Website PDF
ESWA

9. Experimental study on the decision-making and motion behavior of subgroups when facing a static obstacle during movement

Wenhan Wu^#, Wenfeng Yi, Xiaolu Wang, Erhui Wang, Xiaoping Zheng*

Expert Systems with Applications, 2023, 242: 122761.

Article Website PDF
IEEE TITS

8. A Systematic Analysis of Subgroup Research in Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics

Wenhan Wu^#, Xiaoping Zheng*

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2023, 25(2): 1225-1246.

Article Website PDF
TRC

7. A Force-Based Model for Adaptively Controlling the Spatial Configuration of Pedestrian Subgroups at Non-Extreme Densities

Wenhan Wu^#, Wenfeng Yi, Xiaolu Wang, Xiaoping Zheng*

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2023, 152: 104154.

Article Website PDF
IEEE TMM

6. Automatic Identification of Human Subgroups in Time-Dependent Pedestrian Flow Networks

Wenhan Wu^#, Wenfeng Yi, Jinghai Li, Maoyin Chen, Xiaoping Zheng*

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2023, 26: 166-177.

Article Website PDF Supp.
IEEE TCSS

5. Simulating the Evacuation Process Involving Multitype Disabled Pedestrians

Wenhan Wu^#, Wenfeng Yi, Jinghai Li, Maoyin Chen, Xiaoping Zheng*

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2022, 10(5): 2400-2410.

Article Website PDF
IEEE TITS

4. Modeling Crowd Evacuation via Behavioral Heterogeneity-Based Social Force Model

Wenhan Wu^#, Jinghai Li, Wenfeng Yi, Xiaoping Zheng*

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2022, 23(9): 15476-15486.

Article Website PDF
TST

3. Visual Information Based Social Force Model for Crowd Evacuation

Wenhan Wu^#, Maoyin Chen, Jinghai Li, Binglu Liu, Xiaolu Wang, Xiaoping Zheng*

Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2021, 27(3): 619-629.

Article Website PDF
IEEE TITS

2. An Extended Social Force Model via Pedestrian Heterogeneity Affecting the Self-Driven Force

Wenhan Wu^#, Maoyin Chen, Jinghai Li, Binglu Liu, Xiaoping Zheng*

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2021, 23(7): 7974-7986.

Article Website PDF
IEEE TCYB

1. Reconstruction of Tree Network via Evolutionary Game Data Analysis

Xiaoping Zheng^#, Wenhan Wu^#, Wenfeng Deng, Chunhua Yang, Keke Huang*

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 2020, 52(7): 6083-6094.

Article Website PDF

Research Projects

NERTSCP

2. Consequence Evaluation and Decision Support System for National Level Accidents

Wenhan Wu (Technical Research Part)

National Emergency Response Technical Support Center Project, 2023 - 2024
NKRDPC

1. Personnel Evacuation Technology and Assistance Systems for Disabled People in Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games

Wenhan Wu (Technical Research Part)

National Key Research and Development Program of China, 2020 - 2022

Award & Honors

[2016/12 & 2018/12] National Scholarship for Undergraduate Students, Central South University
[2016/10 & 2017/10 & 2018/10] Academic Excellence Scholarship (Grand Prize), Central South University
[2022/12] National Scholarship for Doctoral Students, Tsinghua University
[2021/10 & 2023/10 & 2024/11] Academic Excellence Scholarship (First Prize), Tsinghua University
[2025/01] Zheng Weimin Scholarship (First Prize), Tsinghua University
[2024/12] Outstanding PhD Graduates, Beijing General Colleges and Universities

Conference & Workshop

[2024/02/15–2024/02/17] 25th Seminar “Pattern formation in Biophysics and Chemistry”, Berlin Center for Studies of Complex Chemical Systems, Erfurt, Germany. (Workshop)
[2024/05/27–2024/05/31] “Collective Motions of Animals and Robots”, Research Institute Scientists De Cargèse, Cargèse, Corsica Island, France. (Poster Presentation)

Journal & Conference Reviewers

IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
International Journal of Social Robotics
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory
Scientific Reports
Collective Dynamics
IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)

Research Skills

Research Software: MATLAB, Eclipse, PyCharm, VS Code
Programming Code: C/C++, Python, R, MATLAB, LaTeX
Operating System (OS): Windows, Linux
Language Skill: Chinese (Native), English