Emergency Service for Mass Events

Engineering thesis by Wojciech Fabjańczuk under the supervision of mgr Piotr Gago. Defended in July 2023 at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology.

Implemented emergency service allows the participants to request help on mass events and to start chats with the organizers. Requests for help are put in the queue first so the organizers talk only to the number of participants they can handle in case of heavy application workload. Being informed about the dangers, the organizers may send help or stop the event if necessary. Organizers can create issues for monitoring the incidents and review history of all conversations.

This project is a proof of concept and a learning experience. It is not ready to use on a real mass event.

The tragic event that directly inspired this work is the crowd surge which happened on the 5th November 2021 at the Astroworld Festival in Houston, Texas, where several people died and many others became injured. There were an estimated 50,000 fans at the concert when Travis Scott, the main star of the show, entered the stage resulting in people rushing to the front stage and squeezing so tightly, that some struggled to breathe. Despite this mass casualty incident, the show continued for 40 minutes [1, 2, 3].

Supposedly, if the participants had an easy way to notify the organizers about dangerous situations, they could have sped up sending the help and prevent many injuries or even deaths. Having the information provided by the participants in the crowd, the organizers could have stopped the show earlier and might have reacted more appropriately without inducing too much panic.

The goal of the thesis is to support the security of mass events like concerts, parades and gatherings no matter the kind or the political affiliation. Extreme conditions of such events, i.e. enormous crowds and loud noise or music can make it impossible to contact the organizers in person or via a phone call.

The solution has to allow the participants to request help on mass events and communicate with the organizers. Being informed about the dangers, the organizers will be able to send help or stop the event if necessary.

Secondary goal of the thesis is to popularize the topic of public safety software and hopefully to inspire future work in that area.