SocialGlass was the official platform for real-time crowd management and monitoring of visitors flow during SAIL 2015 in Amsterdam - the largest open nautical event in the world.

The SocialGlass group (Dr. Alessandro Bozzon, Dr. Stefano Bocconi, Achilleas Psyllidis, Christiaan Titos Bolivar, Jie Yang) of the Delft Social Data Science Lab teamed up with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute), the TU Delft Transport & Planing group, DAT.Mobility, the Municipality of Amsterdam, and the organizers of the SAIL Event 2015 for the development of a real-time dashboard for monitoring pedestrian flows during the event. The dashboard was specifically developed for the purpose of SAIL 2015 and extends the current SocialGlass platform with multiple new features and components.

The pilot study used a combination of various methods of real-time data collection to give an optimum picture of pedestrian flows along the SAIL route and its different areas of interest. The main focus of the study was on how to gain reliable information on pedestrian flows during large-scale public events, such as SAIL, and use this effectively for crowd management. This experiment is a first step towards the development of a real-time monitoring system that can be utilized as a support tool by stakeholders responsible for the smooth running of such large-scale events. The experiment run parallel to the established crowd-management methods used by the municipality and, therefore, had no effect on the tasks of the crowd managers.

Combination of methods and techniques

For the purpose of the experiment, we simultaneously integrated real-time data collected by WiFi sensors, counting cameras, GPS trackers, and various social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Sina Weibo). Some of these data mining technologies have already been individually used during large events. However, their simultaneous combination in real-time constitutes a unique example of heterogeneous data integration worldwide. Thus, an innovative system was created that could form the basis of crowd-management systems in the future.

Precise data, available live

The experiment offers insight into the behaviour of visitors to SAIL, the routes people have taken, the amount of time spent at a given location and how the use of the location has progressed. This information is of tremendous value for the organisation of future events. Real-time availability is invaluable when deciding whether measures need to be taken on the basis of the data.

Media Coverage (a selection, in Dutch)

[22.08] Het Parool

[21.08] De Telegraaf

[21.08] Architectenweb

[21.08] AD

[21.08] Gooi en Eemlander

[21.08] IJmuider Courant