WASHINGTON, USA: 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&T) as part of the Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI), and developed and tested by the National Centre for Spectator Sports Safety & Security (NCS4) at the University of Southern Mississippi.

"SportEvac isn't simply more realistic," says programme manager Mike Matthews of S&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.
©IANS