High crowd density measurements from Ramadan at Makkah, 2025

Authors

  • Anders Johansson University of Bristol, School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, Bristol BS8 1TW, United Kingdom
  • Cameron Dobbie University of Bristol, School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, Bristol BS8 1TW, United Kingdom
  • Khaled Albostah SL Rasch GmbH, Paracelsusstraße 26, 70599 Stuttgart, Germany
  • Rainald Löhner Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
  • Jürgen Bradatsch University of Bristol, School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, Bristol BS8 1TW, United Kingdom
  • Knut Haase University of Hamburg Business School, Mittelweg 177, 20148 Hamburg, Germany
  • Yara Alshalhoub Royal Commission for Makkah City and Holy Sites, Makkah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
  • Salim Al-Bosta Royal Commission for Makkah City and Holy Sites, Makkah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14311/APP.2026.57.0135

Keywords:

empirical crowd analysis, Ramadan pilgrim behaviour analysis, computer vision

Abstract

We provide an extensive set of measurement data from Ramadan 2025 at Makkah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Our data covers a wide set of locations around the Holy Mosque (Al Haram). Unlike previous studies of pilgrim flow in Makkah, we analyse the pilgrim behaviour over a large area and over a long period of time, which reveals interesting patterns over space and time.
Our dataset covers crowd movement in the high density, multi-cultural, multi-age, multi-fitness regime. This data is needed to better understand the movement and the behaviour of high density crowds in order to safely manage such crowds.
Analysing real, empirical, crowd flow as opposed to controlled experiments give rise to a number of challenges which are discussed in our paper.

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Published

2026-06-22

Issue

Vol. 57 (2026): Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2025

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Anders Johansson, Cameron Dobbie, Khaled Albostah, Rainald Löhner, Jürgen Bradatsch, Knut Haase, Yara Alshalhoub, Salim Al-Bosta

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Johansson, A., Dobbie, C., Albostah, K., Löhner, R., Bradatsch, J., Haase, K., Alshalhoub, Y., & Al-Bosta, S. (2026). High crowd density measurements from Ramadan at Makkah, 2025. Acta Polytechnica CTU Proceedings, 57, 135-140. https://doi.org/10.14311/APP.2026.57.0135