Simulation of Crowd Movement in Spiral Pattern during Tawaf, in Makkah, Saudi Arabia

Simulation of large crowd is of great interest in different areas of applications such as path planning, entertainment, psychology, sociology, civil engineering, computer vision etc. In recent years, crowd simulation models faces computationally intense problems such as poor crowd management, control, global navigation, they affect the performance of real-time simulation of thousands of pedestrians. The objectives of this study were to improve the performance of the pedestrians during the ritual of Tawaf and to determine the correlation among density as well as pedestrians speed during peak period. Microscopic crowd simulation model software SIMWALK was use for the implementation. The proposed model involves spiral patterns with inwards and outwards pedestrian movements during Tawaf ritual. We plotted the pedestrians’ distribution in terms of density, duration and walking speed, then used statistical test (t-test) to determine if there was a correlation. The simulation outcome of the spiral pattern implies lower density compared to the circular pattern, we obtained maximum density of 8persons/m2 for the circular movement pattern which falls within LoS-E and 4persons/m2 for the spiral path within LoS-C. This result lend support to the idea that flow rate determines how quickly the system reaches its dynamic state. Thus, high flow rate makes the system unstable, because of the effect of increases in density.