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

Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

"Despite efforts to make the hajj safer, another pilgrimage ... of pilgrims have raised concerns about safety measures. ... most victims had ignored the allocated time slot for their groups"

Software can't save idiots from their own undoing. Must be god's will haha

Re:So basically

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Here in the US, we have the good sense to trample other countries to death in order to pay homage to our magical sky-god.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...