Simulation of crowd-quakes with heterogeneous contact model

Abstract

Serious pedestrian trampling in crowd disasters such as the Love Parade happened almost every year all over the world. Many people lost their lives, even more were injured in these disasters. It was found that these hazardous sequence usually happened after a special crowd movement pattern, i.e., crowd turbulent flow, which was believed to be result of earthquake like “pressure release” in the crowds. In the present study, we show video recording analysis results which indicated that there were different kinds of contacts among pedestrians. These contacts mode may be the origin of the pressure release. Thus, based on the discovered contacts mode, we further built heterogeneous contact model for massive crowd. Numerical simulation results of the model can qualitatively describe the statistical properties of pedestrian movement behavior in crowd quakes.