MAMA: multi-agent management of crowds to avoid stampedes in long queues

Abstract

In places of reverence, wherein large crowds gather to have small time duration for individual solace, there is typically a long queue of people waiting for their turn. There have been cases of stampedes with significant loss of life and trauma during such situations because of lack of management of crowds. In this paper, we present MAMA a set of robotic agents that (i) can move at a height to (ii) provide direction and control the crowds to (iii) avoid situations for stampedes to occur. We modeled the problem, and built a multi agent simulation system to conduct experiments that show results of agents managing crowds at appropriate times to avoid possibility of occurring of stampedes.