October 16, 1394

The crowds in Mecca caused the deaths of hundreds of Hajjis, which again signaled the safety challenge of the largest gathering in the world.
A large number of pilgrims enter Saudi Arabia for Hajj ritual every year. On this basis, the density of people is 6 people per square meter, which is a great challenge for the safety of people and the demographics of the population models that are expected to predict such incidents.
In 2010, Saudi Arabia hosted an international competition aimed at placing the largest number of pilgrims on the Kaaba site. One of the best offers offered by Gensler was the introduction of Tonyasar. Thunassar proposed a combination of infrastructure design with technology and operational planning for managing population and preventing a humanitarian catastrophe. “I do not think that you can manage the crowd in a direct and efficient way, you can control the capacity,” Tonasar says.

The Gensler and Thionassar team figured out how to reach the Kaaba site at a crowd of 40,000 to 102,000 people per hour. They also succeeded in calculating population densities from 6 per square meter to 4 per meter.
The Hajjis should go around the Ka’ba seven times in the opposite direction to perform Tawaf. In the new plan, the creation of distinct lands was proposed in the form of circles around the Kaaba to manage the land for the population in the previous ways. The philosophy of this design helped to use the same space to accommodate more of the Hajj instead of expanding the ground floor of the Ka’bah. “If an incident occurs, an additional space means that you prevent people from entering a channel,” says Tonasar.
But simulating this massive population in Hajj is not an easy task. Thinassar quickly realized that commercial software made for this purpose does not have the ability to manage this density of the population. He eventually stopped working with these software and used several other software to analyze his data.
Hajj’s behavior is very different from what is defined in these simulators. The software assumes that people are moving at high speed from existing spaces, such as passengers at airports who want to reach the security gates as soon as possible, but they are carrying out religious ceremonies at the Hajj ceremony, and many of them They can stand in long queues to see the house of God.
Ultimately, the populace’s simulators surrendered to their limitations: mass-market simulators, with collisional modeling, and considering that each person had his own individual physical space, was considered inappropriate to consider all existing designs. . For example, the simulation with Intel’s 64-core Intel 64-core processor lasted two weeks, moving 10 to 20 times slower than actual motion. “We needed a constant change, as well as a logical way to experiment, which is a simulation with all the details for all possible design modes, may be very expensive,” Tonasar says.
Tunarsar’s solution was to avoid using simulator software when designing the project, which made it possible to quickly calculate the accuracy of each design. Instead, he turned to the use of simpler software based on queuing theory, in which the work was based on the input of the components into the system and their behavior over time spent on it. In this case, the components are individuals and their behavior is religious ceremonies that they are doing. The key formula that makes this theory work is called the Little Law. By virtue of this law, the number of foes is easily counted and considered as the input of the Ka’ba calculated. This allowed the Thyonassar and Gensler teams to quickly test different designs and use simulation software to validate the best designs.
The recent disaster in Mecca did not occur in the Ka’bah, but on other routes connecting the Ka’ba to other religious places. According to the BBC, the incident occurred in the fissure of two queues at a distance of 5 kilometers from the Kaaba.
What should be done to prevent such incidents. Thionassar believes that technology can make it safer for Hajj to be safe. He suggests using surveillance cameras and computer programs to monitor the population and identify the signs of danger. The first action can be done by closing a specific entry and opening another output. Saudi Arabia’s Hajj Minister al-Arabiya is reviewing a plan to give an electronic handcuff to every ghost, including personal identification, GPS, alert, compass, and Hajj guidance. Thunassar also points out that such a handcuff could include a vibration to alert the pilgrims and ask them to slow down so that the situation does not deteriorate from what it is. A simple sign that’s more efficient than announcing a speaker in a multilingual crowd.
The study of Tonasar in relation to his population has ensured that the population can effectively organize itself and find the best inputs and outputs. But for a self-organized organization, the population should have access to strong information resources on possible paths, such as alternative security portals. He adds that the crowd will not function properly if basic outputs such as sidewalks of buildings, doors and roads do not provide them with proper moving information.