Crowd management in real time in Dendermonde
Published on 13/03/2023 in Customer Stories
The local police in Dendermonde wanted to know, before the start of the Ros Beiaard pageant, how many people their town could safely accommodate. They analyzed Big Data in order to work this out.
Safe management of visitors to Ros Beiaard pageant in Dendermonde
Once every ten years, crowds of people flood the center of Dendermonde for the Ros Beiaard pageant. Safely managing this crowd is a major challenge for the police. “We had no idea of the number of visitors to expect,” said Patrick Feys, head of the local police department in Dendermonde. The number of visitors had never been counted in previous editions. “But, of course, we wanted to know, beforehand, how many people we could safely accommodate in the town.”
Mobile phones for real-time measurement
The local police contacted Proximus to solve this issue. An application for data analytics detected, in real time, how many people are in the town center and in a certain zone or neighborhood on a normal Sunday. Then a real-time measurement was performed on the day of the procession. “This enabled us to see how many people were already there and how many were still on their way.”
The measured data were obtained from mobile phones on the Proximus network. These phones constantly transmit location information. That data is completely anonymized and aggregated, so it is not possible to identify whose mobile phone it is.
Real-time crowd management of 100,000 visitors
The information about the number of visitors provided the local police with the necessary insight and a powerful tool for conducting real-time crowd management. “If the town center had become too crowded, we would have been able to contain the extra influx of people at the car parks outside the town,” said Feys. The police could also see how busy it was in the various precincts of the town. “This meant that the 100,000 visitors to the pageant were safely managed.” A method of smart police management whereby police officers are sent where they are really needed.
With data analytics you have a better idea of what’s going on with your visitors at a certain time in a certain zone. You can even create advanced reports by combining them with other data sources.
Get started with Big Data yourself and adjust your strategy based on real-time data.
One
One magazine is the Proximus B2B magazine for CIOs and IT professionals in large and medium-sized organisations.