Crowd Evacuation in Hajj Stoning Area: Planning through Modeling and Simulation
Name
sustainability-14-02278.pdf
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5.13 MB
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Checksum (MD5)
12dae581e77c8eab99b86d26d7779283
Author(s)
Kurdi, Heba
Alzuhair, Amal
Alotaibi, Dana
Alsweed, Hesah
Almoqayyad, Noor
Albaqami, Razan
Althnian, Alhanoof
Alnabhan, Najla
Islam, A. B. M. Alim Al
Date Issued
February 17, 2022
Publisher
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Citation
Sustainability 14 (4): 2278 (2022)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Pilgrimage is one of the largest mass gatherings, where millions of Muslims gather annually from all over the world to perform Hajj. The stoning ritual during Hajj has been historically vulnerable to serious disasters that often cause severe impacts ranging from injuries to death tolls. In efforts to minimize the number and extent of the disasters, the stoning area has been expanded recently. However, no research has been carried out to study the evacuation effectiveness of the current exit placements in the area, which lies at the heart of effective minimization of the number and extent of the disasters. Therefore, this paper presents an in-depth study on emergency evacuation planning for the extended stoning area. It presents a simulation model of the expanded stoning area with the current exit placement. In addition, we suggested and examined four different exit placements considering evacuation scenarios in case of no hazard as well as two realistic hazard scenarios covering fire and bomb hazards. The simulation studied three stoning phases, beginning of stoning, during the peak hour of stoning, and ending of stoning at three scales of population sizes. The performance was measured in the light of evacuation time, percentage of evacuees, and percentage of crowd at each exit. The experimental results revealed that the current exits are not optimally positioned, and evacuation can be significantly improved through introducing a few more exits, or even through changing positions of the current ones.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/su14042278
