Macroscopic Crowd Flow and Risk Modelling in Mass Religious Gatherings

Abstract

Understanding the principles and applications of crowd dynamics in mass gatherings is very important, specifically with respect to crowd risk analysis and crowd safety. Historical trends from India and other countries suggest that the crowd crushes in mass gatherings, especially in religious events, frequently occur, highlighting the importance of studying crowd behaviour more scientifically. This is required to support appropriate and timely crowd management principles in planning crowd control measures and providing early warning systems at mass gatherings. Hitherto, the researchers have studied the previous incidents of crowd crushes from the viewpoint of high density and the resulting physical forces and poor geometric facilities, but the factors such as psychological triggers and weather are overlooked. Further, although the average number of victims per panic event seems to decrease, their total number increases with the frequency of mass religious gatherings. Unless proper measures are in place, this trend will continue. Therefore, a comprehensive risk assessment is required to assess the potentially risky situations associated with an event that can lead to crowd crushes. To manage large crowds, an understanding of crowd dynamics is required to reasonably predict the level of risk and implement appropriate crowd management measures. However, there is a lack of empirical studies with real-world data on crowd behaviour and dynamics. Therefore, deriving motivation from the given background, the objectives of this research are: (1) to conduct a detailed empirical data collection in a mass religious gathering in an uncontrolled setup, (2) to understand the fundamental relationships between speed, flow, and density across different sections of case study, (3) to analyse the potentially risky situations observed in the site, and (4) to develop a comprehensive crowd risk model concerning crowd movement in mass religious gatherings and arrive at a Crowd Risk Index (CRI) which can give a range of values on scale...