Slashdot Mirror
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.
The premise behind these simulations is that giving directions to crowds will improve flow of people.
It's a mighty big assumption that the folks in the crowds would follow a signal to "slow down". Between the culture in general (ever see a tidy British style queue in the middle east?), and the general human dynamics of large crowds of people, I don't have much hope of this being a success.
Perhaps a better solution would be to increase the time window for this event- spread the crowd over a few months instead of a few days.
Not all nations have this problem. Indonesia has been cited as the largest Muslim nation, but its people don't seem to have been caught-up in either the religious fervor or in the stereotypes normally associated with Turk, Arab, or Persian people, or the rest of south Asia.
On the other hand, I don't think that religious insanity is ever very far away from any group. We see it leak-out from time to time in the United States and in Europe even most people in these places feel they're beyond it. The Balkan Wars are proof enough of that, people that had been peaceful neighbors for years killed each other even though no one benefited from it. I have no doubt that there are otherwise-functional people that in the right circumstances would attempt to kill me over my religious views even though they stand nothing to lose through my views.
That's my biggest problem with how the Wor on Terrah has been handled, instead of showing how base and petty and low these people are by simply trying them, convicting them, and throwing them in jail like any other murderers and thugs we elevate them by making their actions somehow different. Just throw 'em to the system like any other criminal and move on.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Everyone was calm and patient, as I imagine they are 99.999% of the time at the Hajj. But from the BBC article:
(This is nowhere near the Kaaba, where pilgrims circle around the stone, and where a lot of crowd-control research has been done.) At light densities, columns of people can cross easily and elegantly, such as at a pedestrian crossing. At high densities, it would become physically impossible to make (push) one’s way through a column moving at right angles, with this happening just as people lose their autonomy. With pressure coming in from behind it would become deadly.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
A way to stop giant bags of mostly water from gaining destructive momentum is to add structures which limit how much energy is allowed to accumulate before such energy is harmlessly limited by an obstruction. The way to fix this isn't removing barriers it is adding them... lots and lots and lots and lots of them. With many thousands of stampede deaths the only acceptable solution should be an inherently safe one rather than depending on everyone following instructions.
Thinking people will respond to whatever signals you are piping out in the exceptional but predictable instances when fear takes over a crowd is idiotic in and of itself. The only worse thing I can imagine would be to leverage such delusions as an excuse to enable you to "safely" cram in even more.