Modelling Crowd Dynamics and Crowd Management Strategies

Abstract

A crowd is a large number of people who gather at a specific location at the same time with or without shared agendas and/or emotions. A crowd is formed at sporting, holiday, religious, or political events. Proper management of a crowd is one of the major duties for the civic agencies such as police and fire departments to maintain public order and safety. When such management is ill-prepared and poorly executed, it can result in chaotic situations with human injuries and fatalities as well as damage to public properties. Good crowd management requires a good modelling of crowd dynamics and devising strategies accordingly. This paper presents the modelling and simulations of crowd dynamics that resembles the actual crowd behaviours using the social force model. With the realistic crowd dynamics, different scenarios and crowd management strategies were tested for optimal crowd flows. Our framework can be used to test various scenarios of an event that attracts a large crowd and devise suitable strategies for the crowd management.