Minimisation of the risk of trampling in a crowd

Abstract

Over the past decade, there have been many crowd related tragedies. To help avoid such situations a strategy is developed here to improve the safety of pedestrians in densely populated situations. The results of simulations performed on two cases of accidents involving trampling, which occur when pedestrians are moving, illustrate the ability of this modelling strategy for minimising predicted crowding risks in such situations. This study demonstrates that effective crowd control may be achieved either by adjusting the size of the crowd or the complexity of the environment in which pedestrians walk, which effectively influences their speed. © 2006 IMACS.