Mass experiment on crowd behavior
In a large experiment, researchers sent over a thousand people through narrow passages to study how crowds behave and move so that mass panic, which can lead to injury and death, can be prevented in the future.
Everyone wants to get out
Everyone wants to get home as quickly as possible after a football game. There is often a crowd jam when the stadium is emptying up. In this experiment, the researchers recorded the crowd flows in a regular stadium block.
Running around chaotically
Participants running from three directions - a typical situation in an airport or a train station. Researchers from the Jülich Research Center (Forschungszentrum Jülich) want to find out how crowd flows are formed to make large events safer.
No one has an overview
A camera can identify people from above. But things are very different for someone in the crowd - people can hardly see what is happening a few meters away. That is how a dangeraous scrum can come about.
3D routes
Since the stadium stands are skewed, the cameras record the move of the people in 3D. The paths that they leave are displayed as lines. The places where most people have to go through also have many lines.
Crowd jams are visible
Every ball is a person - red balls represent people who are stuck in a jam while green ones are those who have a free way. The 3D representation also shows people who are tall and those who are small. Large people have a better overview.
Inside in the computer
The people are pushing through the exit. Their movements are recorded mathematically. The computer calculates certain formulas, which are later incorporated into models.
Ellipses to represent how people move
If people are running, they need to have a lot of room in front and behind them. The legs are otherwise in the way. That is why the computer shows them as oval. By doing so, the computer models are very close to the real thing.
From small to large
The researchers at Jülich projected the models - they added more stadium stands together. By doing so, they were able to simulate large masses of people - not just with hundreds, but thousands of people.
A whole stadium
A stadium empties. So how many people are heading to the same buses and trains can be calculated. Are there problems at the parking lots or with public transportation? How many vehicles should there be?
Corridors of different widths
The researchers built three corridors: one is 90 centimeters, and the others were 100 and 110 centimeters. The difference is very low, but while only 42 people were able to go through the narrow corridor, 50 through the wide corridor.
More space creates freedom
The red lines show it - only 20 centimeters more are enough to offer freedom to move. That means more safety at the emergency exits and escape routes.
How is oncoming traffic moving?
In the image, people are moving in opposite directions above, and with each other below. The people in red are moving against the crowd. The experiment shows how people get distributed and whether they hamper themselves.
How much room does every person have?
The same scene as a density model. Every person has a given space around him. It is clearly visible how people moving in opposite direction hamper each other.
Cultural differences
Not all people walk in the same way. That is why the researchers at Jülich compared different cultures: Germans, Indians, Chinese and Japanese. They all had to walk in circles. The result was that Indians walk faster than Germans - maybe they also get crowd jams faster.
The computer can't simulate everything
Are the fans celebrating because their team won? Or are they furious because it lost? Are they drunk? Or are they in a hurry because they want to get on their train? Such factors cannot be easily simulated by the researchers.