Project Details

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Beaver Stadium Pedestrian Flow Data System for Concessions and Egress

Company: Cocoziello Institute

Major(s):
Primary: CMPEN
Secondary: CMPSC
Optional: EE, IE

Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO

Intellectual Property: NO

On a home football Saturday, Beaver Stadium moves more than 100,000 people through its gates in a few hours. Most decisions about concession staffing, inventory, and post-game egress are based on experience rather than actual data on how people move. This project asks a student team to design and test a way to collect pedestrian flow data during a game day. That includes choosing sensing methods (for example, anonymous camera counts, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth probes, or manual counts), deciding where to place them, and figuring out how often to collect data. The team would then use that data to show where and when queues build up within the stadium, outside of the stadium, and how egress happens towards parking lots or other transportation options. We also want the data collected in a way that can feed a simulation of pedestrian and vehicle movement around the stadium. So a key part of the project is defining a clear data format, so that things like gate counts, origin–destination flows, walking speeds, densities, queue lengths, and egress rates that can be used directly as inputs to and checks on a simulation model. Expected outcome: A tested data-collection method and a dataset from at least one home game, organized in a consistent format. It should be directly useful for improving concessions and egress operations, and structured so it can serve as the input and validation data for a demonstration simulation of pedestrian traffic around the stadium.