Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation of Religious Crowd Gatherings in India

Management of religious crowd gatherings is a complex and essential task. Lack of planning and management has resulted in many unfortunate incidents and deaths in the past. Though local authorities deploy crowd management personnel to avert and control this crisis, some unforeseen events still lead to crowd panic resulting in a sudden rush of individuals. In this paper, we have utilized Agent-Based Modelling technique to model a near to real scenario of crowd gatherings at Alopi Devi temple of Allahabad, India. We have attempted to incorporate certain heuristics such as closing and opening of exit and entry gates which can be beneficial in controlling crowd-related disaster. These heuristics are then simulated over panic situations to analyse their effects in terms of numbers of victims. We have used NetLogo, an Agent-Based Modelling tool, to design and simulate our model. The simulation results establish the applicability of our methodology.