Agent-based Crowd Simulation, Analysis and Optimization of Pedestrians Flow during Hajj

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.