'Nowadays more than half of mankind lives in cities. The worldwide growth of cities is inevitable and poses great challenges for the urban development and architecture. In this context knowledge about pedestrian dynamics is important and allows the design and improvement of facilities with respect to safety, level of service and economy. Motivated by these challenges, many pedestrian models are investigated in universities as well as in private companies. In this paper we review the recent development activities in pedestrian dynamics, going from the implementation of experiments under laboratory conditions and extraction of trajectories by video analysis to the modeling and simulation of pedestrian streams in complex facilitie