Testing Effects of Various Barricades and Walls on Crowd Flows in a Four-Way Intersection

Crowd research has become prevalent across many disciplines due to its importance and practicality for public safety and order maintenance. A crowd gathers for peaceful and joyous events such as holiday, music, or religious events. A crowd sometimes, however, becomes agitated, hostile, and even riotous for example during sporting or political events. The potential disaster resulting from major crowd disturbances can cause harm to humans and significant damage to property. Responding law enforcement agencies and other first responders need to carefully devise plans to manage/control a crowd in advance. Such plans require a good understanding of crowd psychology, movement, and behaviours. Utilizing computational crowd models and simulations can be effective when studying a crowd's movement and behaviours so as to construct strategic plans for real events ahead of time. This paper presents a computational crowd model simulated in a four-way intersection. In order to optimize the flow of a crowd, various configurations of barricades and walls were set up along the four streets and the intersection, and the flows of the crowd were subsequently simulated. The experimental results show that rotated walls with certain degrees in the streets optimize the crowd flow. The barricades in the intersection, however, do not improve the crowd flow as compared to no barricades. Comparing various shapes of the barricade, a circle barricade works best, a diamond shape next, and a square worse.