Applying TRIZ principles in crowd management

Overcrowding that happens in places like concerts, stadiums or pilgrimage locations might sometimes cause injury or loss of life. Maintaining the safety of crowd in these places is therefore very important. In addition, increasing the performance of the buildings and structures has always been an important concern. Most of the previous work focused on using new devices and methods for monitoring and management of the crowd but they rarely focus on a comprehensive and structured approach with the purpose of increasing efficiency and safety. In this paper, we explore a Russian “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”, TRIZ, to see whether its principles can help us to solve or improve overcrowding issues. More specifically we find the contradictions that arise in the context of crowd management and we observe which of the categorical solutions suggested by TRIZ might possibly be useful for our problem. Increasing the crowd capacity in a relatively small area, which leads to overcrowding, is one of the common contradictions in crowd management. TRIZ has been suggested as a good method for solving problems which involve contradiction and thus, chosen for this purpose.

Research highlights
► Overcrowding problems can be minimized by referring to Russian “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”, TRIZ.
► Four principles that has the highest potential to reduce the overcrowding problems have been suggested by TRIZ contradiction matrix namely Principle #1 (Segmentation), Principle #7 (Nested Doll), Principle #4 (Asymmetry) and Principle #17 (Another Dimension).
► Some other TRIZ principles that are not suggested by TRIZ contradiction matrix have been found to be helpful in reducing overcrowding issues. They are Principle #23 (Feedback), Principle #33 (Homogeneity) and Principle #10 (Prior Action).