Abstract In large crowd events, there is always a potential possibility that a stampede accident will occur. The accident may cause injuries or even death. Approaches for controlling crowd flows and predicting dangerous congestion spots would be a boon to on-site authorities to manage the crowd and to prevent fatal accidents. One of the most popular approaches is real-time crowd simulation based on position data from personal Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. However, the accuracy of spatial data varies for different GPS devices, and it is also affected by an environment in which an event takes place. In this paper, we would like to assess the effect of position errors on stampede prediction. We propose an Automatic Real-time dEtection of Stampedes (ARES) method to predict stampedes for large events. We implement three different stampede assessment methods in Menge framework and incorporate position errors. Our analysis suggests that the probability of simulated stampede changes significantly with the increase of the magnitude of position errors, which cannot be eliminated entirely with the help of classic techniques, such as the Kalman filter. Thus, it is our position that novel stampede assessment methods should be developed, focusing on the detection of position noise and the elimination of its effect.
@cite_28: Without sufficient preparation and on-site management, the mass-scale unexpected huge human crowd is a serious threat to public safety. A recent impressive tragedy is the 2014 Shanghai Stampede, where 36 people died and 49 were injured in celebration of the New Year’s Eve on December 31st 2014 in the Shanghai Bund. Due to the innately stochastic and complicated individual movement, it is not easy to predict collective gatherings, which can potentially leads to crowd events. In this chapter, with leveraging the big data generated on Baidu Maps, we propose a novel approach to early warning such potential crowd disasters, which has profound public benefits. An insightful observation is that, with the prevalence and convenience of web map service, users usually search on the Baidu Maps to plan a routine, which reveals the users’ future destinations. Therefore, aggregating users’ query data on Baidu Maps can obtain priori and indication information for estimating future human population in a specific area ahead of time. Our careful analysis and deep investigation on the Baidu Maps’ data on various events also demonstrate a strong correlation pattern between the number of map query and the number of positioning in an area. Based on such observation, we propose a decision method utilizing query data on Baidu Maps to invoke warnings for potential crowd events about 1 3 h in advance. Then we also construct a machine learning model with heterogeneous data (such as query data and positioning data) to quantitatively measure the risk of the potential crowd disasters. We evaluate the effectiveness of our methods on the data of Baidu Maps.
@cite_65: There is a need for event organizers and emergency response personnel to detect emerging, potentially critical crowd situations at an early stage during city-wide mass gatherings. In this work, we introduce and describe mathematical methods based on pedestrian-behavior models to infer and visualize crowd conditions from pedestrians' GPS location traces. We tested our approach during the 2011 Lord Mayor's Show in London by deploying a system able to infer and visualize in real-time crowd density, crowd turbulence, crowd velocity and crowd pressure. To collection location updates from festival visitors, a mobile phone app that supplies the user with event-related information and periodically logs the device's location was distributed. We collected around four million location updates from over 800 visitors. The City of London Police consulted the crowd condition visualization to monitor the event. As an evaluation of the usefulness of our approach, we learned through interviews with police officers that our approach helps to assess occurring crowd conditions and to spot critical situations faster compared to the traditional video-based methods. With that, appropriate measure can be deployed quickly helping to resolve a critical situation at an early stage.
@cite_33: We describe a platform for smart, city-wide crowd management based on participatory mobile phone sensing and location situation specific information delivery. The platform supports quick and flexible deployments of end-to-end applications for specific events or spaces that include four key functionalities: (1) Mobile phone based delivery of event space specific information to the users, (2) participatory sensor data collection (from app users) and flexible analysis, (3) location and situation specific message multicast instructing people in different areas to act differently in case of an emergency and (4) post mortem event analysis. This paper describes the requirements that were derived through a series of test deployments, the system architecture, the implementation and the experiences made during real life, large scale deployments. Thus, until today it has been deployed at 14 events in three European countries (UK, Netherlands, Switzerland) and was used by well over 100,000 people.
Crowd management based on data from GPS handheld devices (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches, and personal fitness trackers) has been widely studied. @cite_65 adopted the crowd pressure technique to visualize this information as heat maps, offered a global view of the crowd situation, and assessed different crowd conditions instantaneously throughout an event. @cite_33 implemented a smartphone based crowd management system, which also uses a heat map representation of the crowd state and its evolution. @cite_28 proposed a solution based on Baidu map and developed a prediction model to perceive the crowd anomaly and to assess the risk of the crowd event.