Computer Simulation Shows the Effectiveness of a Suicide Bomber Based on Crowd Configuration

You may not be eager to blow yourself up to "get" 72 virgins, while murdering tens of innocent people around you. But others will do it, in the name of religion, justice and so on.

A recent computer simulation has assessed just how the crowd's behavior influences the number of victims a pedestrian suicide bomber takes with him. The work will be presented on Nov. 27 at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference, to be held in Orlando, Fla. It was made by a team at Florida Institute of Technology by Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar, and Andrew English, president of SIMetrix solutions and a research professor at Florida Techand. The team revealed that the crowd pattern that produced the highest number of victims is a circular one, with a 51 % death rate and 42 % injury rate, resulting a 93 % effectiveness.

Those in line-of-sight with the attacker, hastening towards the exit or in a stampede were the most vulnerable, while the safest position in a crowd was found to be in vertical rows. "Zeeshan is one of the most talented students I have met. His ability to grasp and integrate distinct unrelated topics is impressive," said Dr. Richard Griffith, Florida Tech associate professor and program chair, Industrial/ Organizational Psychology program.

These findings, the first of their kind, could be crucial for emergency response and counter-terrorism plans. Usmani is going to add to his simulation some other physical and social factors - such as landscape, furniture, or crowd behaviors - to see their effect. "There are many applications for this simulation, from special event planning to emergency response," said Usmani.

English has already developed several reports using advanced technologies for training for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the Australian Defense Simulation Office. As part of his master's thesis, Usmani developed a computer simulation of supermarkets to assess the effect of herd behavior on boosting the impulse shopping.