Real Data Evaluation of a Crowd Supervising System for Stadium Evacuation and Its Hardware Implementation

The aim of this paper is to develop an integrated electronic system that allows the dynamical management of congestion and provides the fast evaluation of dynamical circumstances. Thus, a cellular-automata-based model is proposed that estimates the movement of individuals. The presented system incorporates a process that allows the efficient camera-based initialization of the model, without any special prerequirements. The efficiency of the model has been thoroughly validated. Specifically, simulation-derived diagrams that depict the relationship of flow and speed of people as a function of crowd density have been compared with corresponding diagrams from the literature. Furthermore, the system has been evaluated with the use of real data. In particular, simulation results have been compared with real video recordings that depict the crowd evacuation process from a football stadium. Results prove that the proposed management system can estimate fast possible routes of people for the very near future, evaluating all possible exit alternatives. Finally, the proposed model has been implemented in hardware with a field-programmable gate array, enabling its incorporation into an integrated electronic system that estimates crowd movement and prevents congestion in exits almost in real time. The proposed electronic system is advantageous in terms of easy incorporation and portability as well as performance when compared with its analogous graphical-processing-unit implementation.