Abstract:
Hajj is one of the largest mass gatherings where Muslims from all over the world
congregate in Makah each year for pilgrimage. Such large gatherings always have risk
of confrontation with disasters, either natural or man-made. In order to perform Hajj
rituals, Pilgrims move around the various religious sites (Mina, Safa-Marwah, Arafat
and Muzdalifah). In the past few years, thousands of casualties have occurred due to
stampede or chaos during different Hajj rituals, especially during the
Circumambulation of Kaba (Tawaf) and stoning the devil in Mina. In order to make
these events safe and risk free, we have to analyze and propose an appropriate
evacuation strategy to alleviate the risk of causalities. However, it is a daunting
research problem to identify optimal course of actions during emergency disaster
management when several constraints are involved, especially when dealing with a
crowd of massive size.
We propose an Agent-based Crowd Simulation & Analysis framework that
incorporates Anylogic simulation environment to design a mass gathering scenario
e.g. Hajj and simulate large-scale crowd movements to evaluate different evacuation
strategies for mass gatherings. The key features of proposed framework include (i)
design of spatially explicit environments such as buildings, stadiums and mosques
and incorporating obstacles and constraints of the crowd movements (ii) simulating
large-scale crowd behavior using agent-based modeling paradigm (iii) interoperability
with external optimization modules to integrate different optimization algorithms
with simulation model to determine the optimal evacuation plan. We present a case
study of Hajj scenario as a proof of concept and a test bed for identifying and
evaluating different optimal strategies for large-scale crowd evacuation.
