Dynamics of crowd disasters: an empirical study.

By Dirk Helbing, Anders Johansson, Habib Z. Al-Abideen. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 2007

1,143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many observations of the dynamics of pedestrian crowds, including various self-organization phenomena, have been successfully described by simple many-particle models. For ethical reasons, however, there is a serious lack of experimental data regarding crowd panic. Therefore, we have analyzed video recordings of the crowd disaster in Mina/Makkah during the Hajj in 1426H on 12 January 2006. They reveal two subsequent, sudden transitions from laminar to stop-and-go and "turbulent" flows, which question many previous simulation models. While the transition from laminar to stop-and-go flows supports a recent model of bottleneck flows [D. Helbing, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 168001 (2006)], the subsequent transition to turbulent flow is not yet well understood. It is responsible for sudden eruptions of pressure release comparable to earthquakes, which cause sudden displacements and the falling and trampling of people. The insights of this study into the reasons for critical crowd conditions are important for the organization of safer mass events. In particular, they allow one to understand where and when crowd accidents tend to occur. They have also led to organizational changes, which have ensured a safe Hajj in 1427H.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Control and Systems Engineering, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/279196c4d96053a6083ceae2bb3600059564f9a1

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Citations in the corpus

Existence and uniqueness of measure solutions for a system of continuity equations with non-local flow (2011, background): “on Jamarat Bridge in Saudi Arabia, see [16]).”
How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters (2011, methodology): “The simulation results presented in the main text were analyzed by measuring the local speed, local “pressure” and local compression coefficients (4).”
Ordering in bidirectional pedestrian flows and its influence on the fundamental diagram (2011, methodology): “Facing these disagreements, we collect the fundamental diagrams of unidirectional [24]–[27] and bidirectional flow in figure 2.”
The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics (2010, background): “ crowd motion, such as the organization emerging around bottlenecks [6,7], the segregation of opposite flows in pedestrian counterstreams [8,9,10], or the turbulent movement in extremely dense crowds [11,12], it is surprising that social interactions among pedestrians in crowd have been largely negl”
Saving Human Lives: What Complexity Science and Information Systems can Contribute (2014, positive): “ded. Crowd managers should also be alerted by the emergence of stopand-go-waves, a self-organized phenomenon characterized by alternating moving and stopping phases, which is visible to the naked eye [27,28]. As this stop-and-go pattern is related with a reduced ﬂow of people, the density may quickl”
Transitions in pedestrian fundamental diagrams of straight corridors and T-junctions (2011, background): “Several researchers, in particular Fruin and Pauls [17], Predtechenskii and Milinskii [18], Weidmann [19] and Helbing et al [20], have collected information about the relation of occupant density and velocity.”
Abnormal crowd behavior detection using social force model (2009, background): “Generalized social force model is the cornerstone for many studies in simulation of crowd behavior [14] [29][26] in addition to the studies in computer graphics [21][5][25] for creating realistic animations of the crowd.”
Comparison of Pedestrian Fundamental Diagram across Cultures (2009, background): “Several explanations for these deviations have been suggested, including cultural and population differences [10, 11], differences between uni- and multi-directional flow [12, 13, 14], short-ranged fluctuations [13], influence of psychological factors given by the incentive of the movement [6, 8] an”
New Insights into Pedestrian Flow Through Bottlenecks (2007, background): “In the literature one finds a multitude of different explanations for the deviations between fundamental diagrams, including cultural and population differences [8], differences between uniand multidirectional flow [13,19,26], influence of psychological factors given by the incentive of the movement”
Evacuation Dynamics: Empirical Results, Modeling and Applications (2008, background): “D. Helbing, I. Farkas, and T. Vicsek.”