Prediction of human crowd pressures.

Published data on accidents in human crowds that occurred over the past decade show that one of the fatal consequences of crowding was asphyxia, that is by crushing. Here a study was made of our ability to predict human crowd pressures at barriers and thereby be able to take preventive action before crushing causes injury. Utilizing the standard forward-backward autoregressive modeling techniques for spectral analysis of a measured signal, predictions of pressures generated by very high densities of pedestrians have been formulated. The study suggests that several minutes are available for corrective action to be taken to avoid an accident involving crushing of pedestrians.