Hajj Pilgrimage Safety Challenges Crowd Simulator Technology

agent elevator writes: In 2010, Saudi Arabia hosted an international design competition aimed at safely accommodating more pilgrims at Mecca's Grand Mosque. One of the participants told IEEE Spectrum that the crowd densities there (6 people per square meter) bogged down off-the-shelf software so badly that simulation run times were about 10 to 20 times slower than real time crowd movement. Nevertheless, he found some workarounds that gave designers a plan to double the Grand Mosque's peak visitor rate from 40,000 to 102,000 people per hour. Last week's stampede took place well away from the mosque, but signals sent to pilgrims telling them when to speed up or slow down could help prevent such a tragedy, the crowd simulation expert said. Other engineers are turning to fuzzy logic as way to predict how crowds will react in a panic.

Comments

So basically

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically - and hear me out here - a bunch of Muslims are trampling each other to death in order to pay homage to their magical sky-god. I fail to see how this is an issue to be solved. It seems like a self-solving problem.

Re:How about the rest of the world?

[ganjadude]

if you honestly believe they need to catch up, you are a sad sad person

i would wager they killed more i nthe past week in the name of religion than "christians" did in the past decade in the name of religion