Fuzzy Decision-Making in Crisis Situation: Crowd Flow Control in Closed Public Spaces in COVID’19

Human behavior in a crisis situation can be very different from what is expected. Although intrinsically related to the personality of individuals and several other educational and innate parameters, in response to crisis situations, several emotional characters, and spontaneous behaviors can be triggered in search of outcomes. These psychological expressions are multiple and can be followed by variable decision-making inadequacy with the situation. This paper presents the impact of fuzzy behavior in the decision-making process in a crisis. The objective is to control the flow in public closed spaces while avoiding crowd formation to prevent contamination of the COVID’19 virus. We evaluate our model by simulating passenger behaviors in a closed public area during the post-pandemic COVID’19 context. In the experiments, we show the impact of the combination of rationality and emotional characters on the traffic flow and the risk of the pandemic spread. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Dynamic Crowd Accident-Risk Assessment Based on Internal Energy and Information Entropy for Large-Scale Crowd Flow Considering COVID-19 Epidemic

With the increase in inevitable large-scale crowd aggregation, disastrous pedestrian stampedes occurred with increasing frequency over the past decade. To prevent these tragedies, it is significant to assess crowd accident-risk (CAR) and identify high-risk areas to control crowd flow dynamically. The cost function of a conventional fluid dynamics model is improved with new items of Gaussian white noise and protection factor, considering both the abnormal pedestrian movements and social distance control due to epidemic, thereby to establish an improved crowd flow model comprehensively. Different from conventional density-based pedestrian aggregation-risk models, this study proposes a hybrid crowd accident-risk assessment (HCRA) model based on internal energy and information entropy. Using the HCRA model, we can consider not only crowd density but also the modulus and direction of a crowd velocity vector simultaneously. Then this study designs a framework to realize crowd accident risk assessment based on the improved crowd-flow model and HCRA model. To validate the proposed models, case studies of CAR assessment in the large-scale waiting hall of the Shanghai Hongqiao railway station are conducted. The pedestrian social control distance-range of 1.0 m-2.0 m under the COVID-19 epidemic situation is verified numerically. Moreover, a valuable result is that this social control distance-range can be shortened to 1.0 m-1.9 m without increase of crow accident-risk. Subsequently, the down-limit of accommodation-capacity of this large waiting hall can be enhanced to 10.54%under this epidemic. IEEE

Sparse Crowd Flow Analysis of Tawaaf of Kaaba During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the entire world and has put forth high demand for techniques that remotely manage crowd-related tasks. Video surveillance and crowd management using video analysis techniques have significantly impacted today's research, and numerous applications have been developed in this domain. This research proposed an anomaly detection technique applied to Umrah videos in Kaaba during the COVID-19 pandemic through sparse crowd analysis. Managing the Kaaba rituals is crucial since the crowd gathers from around the world and requires proper analysis during these days of the pandemic. The Umrah videos are analyzed, and a system is devised that can track and monitor the crowd flow in Kaaba. The crowd in these videos is sparse due to the pandemic, and we have developed a technique to track the maximum crowd flow and detect any object (person) moving in the direction unlikely of the major flow. We have detected abnormal movement by creating the histograms for the vertical and horizontal flows and applying thresholds to identify the non-majority flow. Our algorithm aims to analyze the crowd through video surveillance and timely detect any abnormal activity to maintain a smooth crowd flow in Kaaba during the pandemic. © 2022 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.