Computational decision support for crowd management applications: A case study on operational in-event pedestrian crowd management

Crowd management is a crucial element in keeping situations safe. Models can help understand in-event crowd management system more thoroughly, and illustrate potential effects of measures before they have to be implemented in real life. However, applications of crowd models for operational support on in-event crowd management are sparse. Two...

Counting people in the crowd using social media images for crowd management in city events

City events are getting popular and are attracting a large number of people. This increase needs for methods and tools to provide stakeholders with crowd size information for crowd management purposes. Previous works proposed a large number of methods to count the crowd using different data in various contexts, but no methods proposed using...

Evacuation behaviors and emergency communications: An analysis of real-world incident videos

Emergencies such as fires and terrorist attacks pose risks of injuries and fatalities, which can be exacerbated by delayed, ill-informed, or unmanaged responses. Effective emergency communication strategies could be used to better inform people and reduce these risks. This research analyzes videos of real-world emergencies to: (a) identify...

Examining evacuee response to emergency communications with agent-based simulations

To improve communication during emergencies, this research introduces an agent-based modeling (ABM) method to test the effect of psychological emergency communication strategies on evacuation performance. We follow a generative social science approach in which agent-based simulations allow for testing different candidate solutions. Unlike...

Estimating crowd density and their emotions for city events using social media images

Event managers at large city events use crowd density as a metric in the process of maintaining safety at large scale city events. Identifying the density of crowds at these events relies on expensive physical infrastructure to work well or have limited accuracy. We propose amethod that addresses the gap of not relying on physical infrastructure...

Using Social Media to Characterise Crowds in City Events for Crowd Management

Using social media data, such as Twitter and Instagram, I identify relevant information, develop data models, estimate and analyse crowds’ characteristics in city events, including demographic and city-role composition, Spatial-temporal distribution, sentiment estimation, Points of Interest preferences, word use, crowd size and density...

Crowd characterization for crowd management using social media data in city events

Large-scale events are becoming more frequent in contemporary cities, increasing the need for novel methods and tools that can provide relevant stakeholders with quantitative and qualitative insights about attendees’ characteristics. In this work, we investigate how social media can be used to provide such insights. First, we screen a set of...

Enhancing crowd monitoring system functionality through data fusion: Estimating flow rate from wi-fi traces and automated counting system data

Crowd monitoring systems (CMSs) provide a state-of-the-art solution to manage crowds objectively. Most crowd monitoring systems feature one type of sensor, which severely limits the insights one can simultaneously gather regarding the crowd’s traffic state. Incorporating multiple functionally complementary sensor types is expensive. CMSs are...

Crowds inside out: Understanding crowds from the perspective of individual crowd members' experiences

With the growth of global population, the big cities become increasingly crowded. It is not rare to see large crowds in public transportations and events with masses of visitors, such as music festivals and football matches. The question “How to deal with crowds” is receiving attention, both from academia and practical crowd management.<br/>This...

Crowd management in train and metro stations: Proposing a framework to select and assess effective crowd management measures

Public transportation ridership has grown significantly over the past decades and this growth is expected to continue into the future. Crowding at train and metro stations is therefore experienced more frequently, resulting in safety issues, decreased comfort levels, increased total travel times and modality shifts. On the long term large...

Planning for operational crowd management

People are becoming more mobile and enterprising. They go to events or go shopping, which means they walk and they are not alone. Especially in larger cities or at events it can get very crowded, which is accompanied by risks. To guarantee the safety of pedestrians, crowd management has to be applied. Knowledge about crowd management is...

A landscape of crowd-management support: An integrative approach

Of the many crowd behavior models, very few have been used in assisting crowd management practice. This lack of usage is partly due to crowd management involving a diversity of situations that require competencies in observing, sense-making, anticipating and acting. Crowd research is similarly scattered across disciplines and needs integration...

Planning Safe Pedestrian Mass Events: Proposing a Framework for Mitigating Risks of Crowd Disasters at Mass Events in the Public Urban Space

Mass events are becoming more popular worldwide, with rising visitor numbers as an effect. The accommodation of larger crowds in the public urban space is not met with the available road capacity. The question is how to maintain crowd safety while continuing to organize massive festivities in the public urban space. Therefore, research has been...

Managing Crowds: Pedestrian Activity Choice Behavior at Mass Events: A Case Study on the Effectiveness of Information Measures during the Vierdaagsefeesten Nijmegen 2013

A field study on real-time self-reported emotions in crowds

Crowd experience is inevitable in daily life. Crowd managers need tools to accurately estimate the psychological aspects of crowds, an important one being crowd emotion. In this study, we explore the feasibility of obtaining a real-time, dynamic map of crowd emotions through self-reporting by crowd members. To this end, a smart phone application...

Designing for crowd well-being: Current designs, strategies and future design suggestions

This paper introduces the concept of crowd well-being and the needs for sustaining it. Crowd well-being can be interpreted as crowd members’ evaluations on their emotional reactions, moods and judgments they form about their satisfactions, goals or needs fulfillment in a crowded situation according to the definition of subjective well-being by...