BaSiGo - New Project in Civil Security

The planning and execution of large public events pose great challenges for the organizers. To improve the safety of such events, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the BaSiGo project starting from 1 March 2012. Public authorities, organizations with security tasks, private event agencies and research institutions - altogether 17 partners - cooperate in this project, which is coordinated by Prof. Frank Fiedrich from the University of Wuppertal. The main goal of BaSiGo is to develop a guideline for security concepts of large public events. Results from the successfully completed research projects of the "Research Programme for Civil Security", such as Hermes, EVA, VeRSiert und SiKomm, will be incorporated.

Within BaSiGo, the team from JSC will execute large-scale experiments with up to 1000 test persons, enhance the methods to automatically extract pedestrian trajectories from video footages, and further develop the models for simulations of pedestrian dynamics. The research will focus on the emergence of congestion and the occurrence of critical states in crowds. The results will help to improve the tools and the methods used to evaluate pedestrian facilities and to determine safe dimensions for large public events. In particular, pedestrian models will be enhanced in order to obtain reliable simulations of dense crowds and identify dangerous congestion in advance.
(Contact: Prof. Dr. Armin Seyfried, a.seyfried@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 202, 26 March 2012