Crowd management in real time in Dendermonde

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.