Safe Egress Scenario Detection: From Baseline to Active Events

Crowd management in public walking spaces has been a topical research theme. In fact, in some spaces such as squares, stations, and commercial areas, there is a strategic need of addressing the uprising challenges to public safety, ensuring an effective crowd evacuation in emergency scenarios induced by various hazardous critical events, including malicious actions performed by individuals or groups. Already existing engineering tools can support the evaluation of the egressing scenario by means of simulations so that such tools can support emergency operators in finding the best strategy during a dynamic egress scenario. However, egress within a space is influenced by many factors, such as the number of bystanders and their age, or the position of the initiating event. As a result, an infinite number of combinations may occur, thus is unfeasible to provide a scenario to support emergency operators, which must rely on a subset of simulations to be called when the egress event starts. Moreover, it is difficult to identify if an egress event has started since the movement of people is usually recorded via people counter sensors which are placed at egress exits. In this paper, a novel approach to safe egress is discussed. Such an approach, starting from pre calculated simulations, defines a baseline of the number of people crossing an exit in a normal scenario. Such baseline can be compared with the real sensor data to identify anomalies and thus detect egress start. In this paper, sensor data is replaced with egress simulations for comparison.