Main Contributing Factors and the Heuristic Approach for Assessing Risk at Mass Gatherings

Mass gathering (MG) planners make use of guidelines to manage the events. Risk assessment tools in the guidelines have two shortcomings. First, they do not take into account all the impacting risk factors. Second, they do not allow event planners to minimize the event risk by controlling risk factors. This study focuses on MG event planning to reduce the risk of negative medical outcomes for attendees. A literature review was conducted to identify a list of factors imposing risk to the attendees’ health. Then, a decision support framework and a management dashboard are developed that assist MG planners in making informed decisions on how to mitigate the event risk for attendees. A hypothetical scenario is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. The final normalized risk scores are 0.76, 0.69, 0.48, 0.47, 0.45, and 0.25 for the categories of participants, event details, weather, infrastructure, medical, and security and safety, respectively. Changes to controllable factors within the budget’s constraints resulted in significant improvements in the normalized risk scores of three categories, lowering the overall risk score from 3.59 to 3.10. When combined with data analysis techniques and optimization algorithms, the proposed framework will be a powerful managing assistant for MG planners, allowing them to make more accurate and data-driven decisions. Data analysis can help in determining the magnitude of risk factors and optimization can identify the optimal trade-off between different factors to minimize risk for attendees while considering all other constraints such as budget and time.