On current crowd management practices and the need for increased situation awareness, prediction, and intervention (original) (raw)

Crowd management and the use of technology to make or to mar

Adaeze Anthony , 2023

Crowd management is fast becoming a fundamental part of any discussion on event management. The need to make the world a global social village has given rise to events nationally and across national boundaries and cultures. With this responsibility comes the need to ensure the safety and overall well-being of every guest. Previous traditional methods have proven inadequate, thereby allowing more sophisticated modern technologies to come to the rescue. This paper would show that technology in crowd management has been immensely productive, but there is a dire need for collaboration between technology and human personnel in ensuring effective crowd management.

Crowd science – A planning approach to safety at mass gatherings and events

Mass gatherings are planned or spontaneous events where the number of people attending is sufficient to strain the planning and response resources of the host. They are characterised by the concentration of people, generally on a predictable basis, in venues or precincts that are open or enclosed. Examples include sporting (e.g. Summer and Winter Olympics, FIFA World Cup) and religious (e.g. Hajj, World Youth Day) events, cultural festivals and music festivals. Mass gatherings can also occur at train stations (e.g. London Underground, Paris Metro), shopping complexes (e.g. IKEA opening in London, annual store sales), business precincts and tourist attractions. A number of studies and official inquiries have identified inadequate planning as a major contributory factor to deficiencies in crowd safety at mass gatherings. Proper planning involves an assessment of attendant safety risks using traditional risk assessment methods. These generally tend to deal with the hazards and risks usually found at most workplaces without taking into account the dynamics of the crowd or those factors that influence its behaviour. Insufficient attention to the way that people behave in a crowd, and the relationship between behaviour and system design, are major factors in crowd disasters. Due to the sheer number of attendees, the nature of activity and potential patron behaviour, risk is always shifting and changing throughout the course of a mas gathering event. How crowd-related safety risks can change over time is difficult to both visualise and articulate in the conventional risk assessment process. This paper presents contemporary and innovative approaches to risk analysis and monitoring for crowd safety which provide a more relevant, meaningful and valuable contribution to the assessment of (dynamic) crowd-related risks.

In-Depth Survey to Detect, Monitor and Manage Crowd

IEEE Access

Crowd management is a flourishing, active research area and must be given attention due to the potential losses, disasters, and accidents that could occur if it were neglected. For the last decade, the crowd management field has witnessed significant advancements; however, more investigative work is still needed. The integration of different crowd detection and monitoring techniques can enhance the control and the performance compared to those of more limited stand-alone techniques. Crowd management encompasses an entire process, from the monitoring stage through the decision support system stage. This sector involves accessing and interpreting information sources, predicting crowd behavior, and deciding on the use of a range of possible interventions based on context. This paper shows a fresh conclusive review of the concept of the crowd, discussing it from several perspectives in light of its defining characteristics, its risks, and tragedies, which may occur due to challenges faced during crowd management, where these conclusions are based on a massive number of scholarly articles that were newly published. Besides, a systematic discussion is shown concerning the steps of managing a crowd, including crowd detection, in which several new methods are reviewed, followed by illustrating both direct and indirect approaches to crowd monitoring and tracking monitoring. The primary purpose of this review is to establish a comprehensive understanding of crowdrelated processes. Moreover, it aims to find research gaps to overcome the limitations of using stand-alone techniques in each process and provide support to other researchers' future work.

Crowd Management

Crowd Management, 2019

The first text to present a system for crowd management which integrates security with the other concerns for the health and safety for crowds, looking at the theories and practices of the management processes, plans, monitoring and evaluation of crowds.

Managing Crowds with Wireless and Mobile Technologies

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2018

Thousands of people have lost their lives in stampedes and other crowd related disasters in recent years. Most of these fatalities seem to have been caused by poor control and management of crowds, which is discussed in this article. An efficient and effective crowd management system must also have a plan to deal with the ongoing threat of terrorism and outbreak of various kinds of communicable diseases. In this article, we present a framework of a Crowd Control and Health Management System specially designed to prevent and manage stampedes and other disasters. The system has two subsystems; one for dealing with the management of stampedes and other disasters and the other with healthcare management. As part of the proposed system, an algorithm for an early detection of stampedes, with proof and simulation of implementation, is provided. As part of the healthcare management subsystem, we integrate several mobile applications and develop four of them dealing with relief issues, blood...

Crowd Safety in Emergencies

BA(Hons) Final Dissertation, 2016

Abstract “How the psychology of crowd behaviour impacts on operational resilience.” This is a report prepared from a literature search together with research using expert theorists and practitioners. The report investigates the changing demographics and behaviours of crowds when subjected to stressful emergency situations and how this affects the operational resilience for Event Safety organisations. This study has set out to examine the history of psychological research on crowd processes, to unpack the plethora of theory and research to understand the patterns of crowd actions and individual behaviours. There is still a tendency to focus on early scientific theorists such as Gustave Le Bon’s research (Le Bon 1895), which separates crowds from their social context. His theory assumed that crowd participation counters our normal view of psychological behaviours, revealing a primitive and uncontrolled behaviour (Reicher, 1996 Reicher and Potter, 1985). Stephen Reicher (Reicher 1982,1987) argues that ‘one of the more remarkable features of traditional crowd psychology is that it has tended to constitute a theory without a referent. Rather than starting from a set of phenomena that are in need of explanation, a set of explanations were elaborated in order to underpin certain ideological presuppositions about the crowd - or at least the suppositions of gentleman observers who viewed the masses with alarm from the outside’. Crowds should not be seen as aggressive and uncontrollable in emergency situations but with patterns and behaviours that reflect social and cultural influences. There are a number of social scientists that now support this view (Krantz, 1988, Turner and Killian 1964, Williams, 1986, Reicher, Drury, Stott, 1996, 1997, 1999), arrived at after relevant scientific research to investigate patterns of crowd behaviour to show that there are observable trends that reflect existing cultures and social identity.

Place crowd safety, crowd science? Case studies and application

Journal of Place Management and Development, 2020

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the development and application of place crowd safety management tools for areas of public assembly and major events, from a practitioner perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe crowd safety risk assessment model is known as design, information, management-ingress, circulation, egress (DIM-ICE) (Still, 2009) is implemented to optimise crowd safety and potentially throughput. Three contrasting case studies represent examples of some of the world’s largest and most challenging crowd safety projects.FindingsThe paper provides some insight into how the DIM-ICE model can be used to aid strategic planning at major events, assess potential crowd risks and to avoid potential crowd safety issues.Practical implicationsIt provides further clarity to what effective place management practice is. Evidence-based on the case studies demonstrates that the application of the DIM-ICE model is useful for recognising potential place crowd safety issues and identifyin...

Analysing the Effectiveness of Wearable Wireless Sensors in Controlling Crowd Disasters

Procedia Computer Science, 2014

The Love Parade disaster in Duisberg, Germany lead to several deaths and injuries. Disasters like this occur due to the existence of high densities in a limited area. We propose a wearable electronic device that helps reduce such disasters by directing people and thus controlling the density of the crowd. We investigate the design and effectiveness of such a device through an agent based simulation using social force. We also investigate the effect of device failure and participants not paying attention in order to determine the critical number of devices and attentive participants required for the device to be effective.

Crowd Monitoring

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

Festivals and big scale events are becoming more and more popular, they can attract thousands of spectators. Ensuring the safety of the crowd has become a top priority to many organisers after the multitude of dramatic accidents that resulted in losses in human lives. Monitoring the crowd via smartphones is a relatively new technique that emerged recently with the capabilities of mobile phones to transmit their GPS location data. We present a novel approach, based on the local crowd pressure, combined with the detection of groups in a crowd, to detect critical situations and propose evacuation plans that does not separate groups of people that are together. Groups were detected using DBSCAN clustering algorithm with 80 % accuracy. Location acquisition was tested during the Campus Fever event, and 87 % of the collected data had an accuracy lower than 10 m while 29 % of the total data had 5 m of accuracy. During 2 h of monitoring, activity of the application, reduced the battery of 20 %.