The personal space and the collective behavior of crowd disasters

Abstract

The concept of the personal space in crowd dynamics is commonly underestimated. However, the self-awareness of it can prevent and handle risk situations in human crowds. The aim of this study was to explore theoretically the use of the personal space as an interdisciplinary concept and design a computational model based on cellular automata for modeling collective behaviors related to crushing events. We generated transitional rules based on the Shelling's spatial proximity model of segregation. Based on an explorative data analysis and model validation, we found that the dynamics of crowd events showed dependencies between similar or dissimilar individual preferences and their interpersonal distances. These results suggests that crushing events in social gatherings are highly probable and that the initial space between attendees is the key for delaying the presence of crowd disasters.