Intelligent evacuation management systems: A review

Crowd and evacuation management have been active areas of research and study in the recent past. Various developments continue to take place in the process of efficient evacuation of crowds in mass gatherings. This article is intended to provide a review of intelligent evacuation management systems covering the aspects of crowd monitoring, crowd disaster prediction, evacuation modelling, and evacuation path guidelines. Soft computing approaches play a vital role in the design and deployment of intelligent evacuation applications pertaining to crowd control management. While the review deals with video and nonvideo based aspects of crowd monitoring and crowd disaster prediction, evacuation techniques are reviewed via the theme of soft computing, along with a brief review on the evacuation navigation path. We believe that this review will assist researchers in developing reliable automated evacuation systems that will help in ensuring the safety of the evacuees especially during emergency evacuation scenarios

Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging forms of playfulness

Editorial. No abstract is available

Crowd Counting Through Walls Using WiFi

Counting the number of people inside a building, from outside and without entering the building, is crucial for many applications. In this paper, we are interested in counting the total number of people walking inside a building (or in general behind walls), using readily-deployable WiFi transceivers that are installed outside the building, and only based on WiFi RSSI measurements. The key observation of the paper is that the inter-event times, corresponding to the dip events of the received signal, are fairly robust to the attenuation through walls (for instance as compared to the exact dip values). We then propose a methodology that can extract the total number of people from the inter-event times. More specifically, we first show how to characterize the wireless received power measurements as a superposition of renewal-type processes. By borrowing theories from the renewal-process literature, we then show how the probability mass function of the inter-event times carries vital information on the number of people. We validate our framework with 44 experiments in five different areas on our campus (3 classrooms, a conference room, and a hallway), using only one WiFi transmitter and receiver installed outside of the building, and for up to and including 20 people. Our experiments further include areas with different wall materials, such as concrete, plaster, and wood, to validate the robustness of the proposed approach. Overall, our results show that our approach can estimate the total number of people behind the walls with a high accuracy while minimizing the need for prior calibrations.Comment: 10 pages, 14 figure

Crowoding in Mina based on pilgrims’ perception of safety and comfort in Hajj

Crowding perception has been studied in various settings to alleviate the effect of the crowded conditions on participants’ well-being. These include festivals, outdoor recreation, tourism and retail settings. However, very few researches have addressed the crowding perception in religious settings that include a large number of populations such as during the Hajj. More than two million pilgrims perform their Hajj every year. The Hajj process involves staying at the holy site of Mina from four to five days. In Mina, the pilgrims require a peaceful atmosphere to perform their Hajj rituals. A large number of pilgrims and Mina’s spatial constraints led to crowded conditions that affected the pilgrims’ peaceful atmosphere and created serious safety and comfort concerns. It appears that little research consideration has been given to alleviate the impact of the crowded conditions on the pilgrims. Therefore, the research aim is to establish parameters that affect pilgrims’ levels of crowding perception toward enhancing their perception of safety and comfort in Mina during the Hajj. Accordingly, a systematic literature review was employed to develop a conceptual framework that considers the possible influential factors that might affect the pilgrims’ and the effect of their perceived crowding on perceived levels of safety and comfort in Mina. Then, this research used a quantitative research design and data were randomly collected from 1243 pilgrims of seven pilgrim groups representing seven Hajj establishments. The data were analysed using the SPSS and AMOS software. The findings revealed that for all pilgrims, one socio-demographic factor (education), one personal factor (expectation), two social factors (provision of information and activities) and three physical factors (routing strategies, disorientation causes and coding and signage) are observed to have significant impact on the pilgrims’ crowding perception, which significantly affects their levels of perceived safety and comfort in Mina. The findings also indicated that the impact of influential factors on the pilgrims’ crowding perception varies according to their pilgrims’ group. Based on the findings, this research recommended eight parameters that affect the pilgrims’ levels of crowding perception to enhance their levels of perceived safety and comfort in Mina. Furthermore, this thesis suggested some theoretical and practical implications as well as important avenues for future research

ICE-MILK: Intelligent Crowd Engineering using Machine-based Internet of Things Learning and Knowledge Building

Title from PDF of title page viewed June 1, 2022Dissertation advisor: Sejun SongVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 136-159)Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2022The lack of proper crowd safety control and management often leads to spreading human casualties and infectious diseases (e.g., COVID-19). Many Machine Learning (ML) technologies inspired by computer vision and video surveillance systems have been developed for crowd counting and density estimation to prevent potential personal injuries and deaths at densely crowded political, entertaining, and religious events. However, existing crowd safety management systems have significant challenges and limitations on their accuracy, scalability, and capacity to identify crowd characterization among people in crowds in real-time, such as a group characterization, impact of occlusions, mobility and contact tracing, and distancing. In this dissertation, we propose an Intelligent Crowd Engineering platform using Machine-based Internet of Things Learning, and Knowledge Building approaches (ICE-MILK) to enhance the accuracy, scalability, and crowd safety management capacity in real-time. Specifically, we design an ICE-MILK structure with three critical layers: IoT-based mobility characterization, ML-based video surveillance, and semantic information-based application layers. We built an IoT-based mobility characterization system by predicting and preventing potential disasters through real-time Radio Frequency (RF) data characterization and analytics. We tackle object group identification, speed, direction detection, and density for the mobile group among the many crowd mobility characteristics. Also, we tackled an ML-based video surveillance approach for effective dense crowd counting by characterizing scattered occlusions, named CSONet. CSONet recognizes the implications of event-induced, scene-embedded, and multitudinous obstacles such as umbrellas and picket signs to achieve an accurate crowd analysis result. Finally, we developed a couple of group semantics to track and prevent crowd-caused infectious diseases. We introduce a novel COVID-19 tracing application named Crowd-based Alert and Tracing Services (CATS) and a novel face masking and social distancing monitoring system for Modeling Safety Index in Crowd (MOSAIC). CATS and MOSAIC apply privacy-aware contact tracing, social distancing, and calculate spatiotemporal Safety Index (SI) values for the individual community to provide higher privacy protection, efficient penetration of technology, greater accuracy, and effective practical policy assistance.Introduction -- Literature review -- IoT-based mobility characterization -- ML-based video/image surveillance -- Semantic knowledge information-based tracing application -- Conclusions and future directions -- Appendi

Modeling crowd dynamics through coarse-grained data analysis

Understanding and predicting the collective behaviour of crowds is essential to improve the efficiency of pedestrian flows in urban areas and minimize the risks of accidents at mass events. We advocate for the development of crowd traffic management systems, whereby observations of crowds can be coupled to fast and reliable models to produce rapid predictions of the crowd movement and eventually help crowd managers choose between tailored optimization strategies. Here, we propose a Bi-directional Macroscopic (BM) model as the core of such a system. Its key input is the fundamental diagram for bi-directional flows, i.e. the relation between the pedestrian fluxes and densities. We design and run a laboratory experiments involving a total of 119 participants walking in opposite directions in a circular corridor and show that the model is able to accurately capture the experimental data in a typical crowd forecasting situation. Finally, we propose a simple segregation strategy for enhancing the traffic efficiency, and use the BM model to determine the conditions under which this strategy would be beneficial. The BM model, therefore, could serve as a building block to develop on the fly prediction of crowd movements and help deploying real-time crowd optimization strategies

A roadmap for the future of crowd safety research and practice: Introducing the Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety and the imperative of a Vision Zero target

Crowds can be subject to intrinsic and extrinsic sources of risk, and previous records have shown that, in the absence of adequate safety measures, these sources of risk can jeopardise human lives. To mitigate these risks, we propose that implementation of multiple layers of safety measures for crowds—what we label The Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety—should become the norm for crowd safety practice. Such system incorporates a multitude of safety protection layers including regulations and policymaking, planning and risk assessment, operational control, community preparedness, and incident response. The underlying premise of such model is that when one (or multiple) layer(s) of safety protection fail(s), the other layer(s) can still prevent an accident. In practice, such model requires a more effective implementation of technology, which can enable provision of real-time data, improved communication and coordination, and efficient incident response. Moreover, implementation of this model necessitates more attention to the overlooked role of public education, awareness raising, and promoting crowd safety culture at broad community levels, as one of last lines of defence against catastrophic outcomes for crowds. Widespread safety culture and awareness has the potential to empower individuals with the knowledge and skills that can prevent such outcomes or mitigate their impacts, when all other (exogenous) layers of protection (such as planning and operational control) fail. This requires safety campaigns and development of widespread educational programs. We conclude that, there is no panacea solution to the crowd safety problem, but a holistic multi-layered safety system that utilises active participation of all potential stakeholders can significantly reduce the likelihood of disastrous accidents. At a global level, we need to target a Vision Zero of Crowd Safety, i.e., set a global initiative of bringing deaths and severe injuries in crowded spaces to zero by a set year