Optimization Of The Evacuation Of The Music Festival Grounds Using A Numerical Model

Every summer, countless cultural events and open-air music festivals take place around the world. Festivals are often held in places that were not primarily designed for this purpose (meadows, former airport areas, former industrial areas with existing buildings).

These are places with a large concentration of people - in the order of several thousand to tens of thousands of visitors and very often with a low degree of protection (the so-called "soft target"). These types of places become potentially easy targets for a terrorist attack (bomb, gunner) or crowd disaster. For places with a high concentration of people, the crisis situations mentioned are a great danger in the form of crowd evacuation, which can lead to numerous injuries or even death. The process of organizing and planning evacuation from music festival grounds is not only one of the key components of the emergency response strategy, but also an emphasis on public safety, which is a very sensitive topic in the domestic and foreign environment.

The paper analyzes the evacuation process and the impact on its performance during the crisis situation of the festival grounds in the Czech Republic. It is a part of the former production area with the existing development.The complex has only two emergency exits and its total area is over 45,000 m^2. The evacuation process is simulated using Pathfinder software, in these variants of scenarios - normal operation, simple evacuation and evacuation in a crisis situation (waiting, blocking the exit). Scenarios are simulated with different occupancy of the area. The geometry is created according to the existing operational solution of the area, which is, thanks to the knowledge from repeated simulations, optimized into a safer form and supplemented with new evacuation exits. The outputs of selected variants were statistically evaluated and compared against each other.