Crowd management is a difficult task. Large crowds gathering or heavy pedestrian traffic are events of serious concern for officials tasked with managing public spaces. In practice, crowd management is essentially performed without support of dedicated technologies. Some management scenarios can be studied from simulation but require simulation parameters that can be difficult to estimate. The EU-funded CrowdDNA project proposes a new technology based on innovative crowd simulation models. It facilitates predictions on the dynamics, behaviour and risk factors of high-density crowds, addressing the need for safe and comfortable mass events. The project suggests that the analysis of some specific macroscopic characteristics of a crowd such as its apparent motion can offer important information about its internal structure and allow the exact assessment of its state.
CrowdDNA is a radically new concept to assist public space operators in crowd management, i.e. mass event organisation, heavy pedestrian traffic management, crowd movement analysis and decision support. The CrowdDNA technology is based on a new generation of crowd simulation models capable of predicting the dynamics, behaviour and risk factors of extremely dense crowds. The basic idea behind CrowdDNA is that the analysis of some specific macroscopic features of a crowd, such as its apparent motion (which can be easily measured in real crowd events), can reveal valuable information about its internal structure and provide an accurate estimate of a crowd's state. This challenges existing paradigms in the field, which rely on simulation techniques and require the measurement of simulation variables to initialise them, such as density, number or individual features, each of which is difficult to estimate. This vision raises a major scientific challenge, which can be summarised as the need for a deep understanding of the relationships between the smallest scales of crowd behaviour (e.g. contact and shoving at the limb scale) and the largest up to the whole crowd. CrowdDNA is the first attempt to combine biomechanical and behavioural simulation in complex scenarios of crowd interaction. The project proposes technological solutions the practice of crowd management to meet the demands of modern society for safety and comfort at mass events or in crowded transport facilities. CrowdDNA lays the foundations for new research on crowds and opens up new opportunities for studies of physical interaction in cognitive science and biomechanics, as well as robotics and autonomous vehicles for safe navigation among people.
