Crowd Simulations

Highly dense crowds have been a major threat for large public events. The 2010 Love Parade disaster has resulted in a large amount of data, such as research papers, professional reports, and video footage, that can be used to study this disaster from different perspectives. In a series of simulations, we aim to provide a computer-aided crowd disaster forecasting tool that can be used to help analyze the disaster at an organizational level. From the simulation results, we can recommend and test various administrative methods in order to prevent the disaster. Our initial work in this area produced unrealistically high crowd densities, so a necessary next step of this study was to improve the navigation mechanism. By applying the Social Force Model for steering agents, we aim to replicate the disaster virtually and devise strategies for better crowd management. We are also now verifying these simulation results with real human participants using state of the art virtual reality devices.