Effective Crowd Management in a T-Intersection

A crowd assembles together for a common goal or purpose at holiday, sporting, religious, or political events. Some events might be peaceful and celebratory, while others might be hostile or even riotous. Different crowd management strategies need to be devised and executed depending on the event’s characteristics, crowd, and environmental configurations. Failure of such strategies may result in human casualties and property damages. Considering all possible cases, law enforcement agencies must plan how to manage a large crowd in advance. This paper presents crowd management strategies in a T-intersection using barricades for peaceful, celebratory events such as the Honda Celebration of Light in Vancouver, Canada. Agent modelling and simulation technique was utilized to simulate the crowds’ exits after the event. Crowd simulations with/without various arrangements of barricades were conducted, and their results were discussed. The experimental results show that forcing the crowds to move to a specific route in a T-intersection leads to the fastest dispersion.