Pedestrian control measures for efficient emergency response management in mass gatherings

Purpose: In mass gatherings, a large number of people gather at a single location. To ensure safety of these people, adequate crowd management strategies are essential. Specifically, in case of an emergency, efficient evacuation can save the lives of many people. This paper aims to develop various control strategies for efficient evacuation, including providing information of routes, changing the physical layout and controlling the behavior of evacuees. Design/methodology/approach: Mathematical models have been developed for optimal decision-making and analysis of the effect of these control strategies during evacuation. A global search with Sequential Quadratic programming is used to increase the likelihood of obtaining the optimal solution to these models. Further, an illustrative evacuation example is presented to test the efficacy of the models. Findings: The results of the illustrative example demonstrate that the models and their corresponding strategies can bring significant benefits for efficient evacuation. Practical implications: The models developed can play a significant role in helping the security staff execute evacuation better at an operational level. The authors' models can also have implications at the strategic level for the crowd manager. Social implications: Efficient strategies and optimal decision-making during evacuation can save lives of people. These models can develop efficient strategies that can save lives of people. Originality/value: This paper fulfills need to study the effect of various control strategies on evacuation efficiency for a large area and its complete network.