New software to help empty stadiums during bomb threats

Washington, April 13 : Imagine trying to get out of a stadium with 70,000 fans after a bomb explodes, or even a bomb threat. For an evacuation on this scale, there are no dress rehearsals or practice drills - just simulation software.

A new breed of simulation software - dubbed SportEvac - is being funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S and T) as part of the Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI), and developed and tested by the National Centre for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4) at the University of Southern Mississippi.

"SportEvac isn't simply more realistic," says programme manager Mike Matthews of S and T's Infrastructure and Geophysical Division. "It will become a national standard," he adds.

Using blueprints from actual stadiums, the developers are creating virtual, 3D e- stadiums, packed with as many as 70,000 avatars - animated human agents programmed to respond to threats as unpredictably as humans.

Security planners will be able to see how 70,000 fans would behave and misbehave when spooked by a security threat.

But a SportEvac avatar need not be a sports fan. The simulation includes make-believe stadium workers, first responders, even objects, such as a fire truck or a fan's car. SportEvac tracks them all, accounting for scenarios both probable and improbable.

Simulating thousands of people and cars can impose a crushing load on software and hardware. That's why, unlike SportEvac, most evacuation softwares are unable to simulate a crowd much larger than 5,000.

Beyond scaling problems, earlier simulators did not account for the myriad variations that make human behaviour hard to predict and human structures hard to simulate, a DHS release said.

How adversely, for example, would an evacuation be impaired due to, say, a wet floor, a wheelchair, a stubborn aisle-seater, a fan fetching a forgotten bag, or an inebriated bleacher bum?

Conventional evacuation simulators couldn't say. SportEvac can. And like an open-source Web browser, the SportEvac software will get better and better because it's built on open, modular code, it said.