Crowd and environmental management during mass gatherings

Area of Science:

• Urban dynamics and public health
• Computational modeling
• Epidemiology

Background:

• Crowds are common in urban environments, impacting public health and safety.
• Existing crowd movement models address safety concerns but not epidemic spread.
• Current epidemic models are population-level, lacking microscopic detail.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review computer models for crowd movement and their application to health and safety.
• To explore the potential of fine-scale data for developing microscopic epidemic models.
• To demonstrate how individual-based crowd models can simulate epidemic dynamics.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing computer models for crowd movement simulation.
• Exploration of fine-scale data collection for epidemic modeling.
• Development and simulation of an individual-based crowd model.

Main Results:

• Computer models effectively identify health and safety issues in crowded environments.
• Individual-based crowd models can replicate aggregate epidemic patterns (e.g., susceptible-infected-recovered).
• Microscopic epidemic modeling is feasible with sufficient fine-scale data.

Conclusions:

• Crowd movement models offer valuable tools for assessing urban health and safety.
• Transitioning epidemic modeling to a microscopic scale, inspired by crowd simulations, is a promising research direction.
• Integrating fine-scale data can enhance the predictive power of epidemic models for public health interventions.