Citation

Usmani Z, Kirk D. J. Def. Model. Simul. Appl. Methodol. Technol. 2009; 6(2): 79-95.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Society for Modeling and Simulation International, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1548512909347476

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Explosions in civil settings are becoming the daily news. While various explosive simulations and models have been developed for battlefield and industrial settings, much less has been done for civil settings and urban terrains.This paper presents the science of suicide bombing and explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics, and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation.The proposed simulation tool is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. Results indicate that the worst crowd formation is a street (zigzag) where 30% of the crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given the typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row-wise crowd formation was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% of the crowd in the lethal zone and 38% in the injury zone. Crowd blockage and densities can reduce the fatalities by 12% and injuries by 7%. Simulation results were compared and validated by real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.