Crowd Behavior Research with Mobile App

(ETH Zurich, July 08, 2013)

Researchers from ETH Zurich developed a mobile app to gather people's positional data to model crowd behaviors. During Switzerland's biggest city festival, the "Züri Fäscht" taking place in Zurich every three years, over 27'000 users used the app and provided the researchers with a dataset of 23 million GPS location points. As a first result, the researchers found that the hotspots and potentially congested areas they identified using the mobile data corresponded very well to the observations of the police - although only a fraction of the 2.3 million festival guest were using the app. A more detailed analysis of the complex dataset will include modelling the flow of visitors through the city. The researchers hope to find ways to predict crowd dynamics accurately enough to avoid potentially dangerous congestions.