Project Overview
As many other sports clubs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the soccer club FC Viktoria Köln needed to elaborate a safety and hygiene concept to allow visitors in their stadium again. This concept should minimize the risk of infections while still allowing as many supporters as possible to attend their desired sport events.
In order to overcome this big challenge, the club had already developed first safety and hygiene rules by themselves and calculated a rough capacity with a spreadsheet model. ARC was asked to review and optimize this approach by means of simulation.
Services provided
In a first step, the existing safety and hygiene concept was replicated in the simulation to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Seeing the theoretical concept in a realistic operational 3D environment allowed extremely valuable insights and lead to further scenarios to be tested. Questions, that could be answered with the simulation include:
- Does the theoretical concept perform as expected or how can it be optimized?
- How long do passengers need to wait and entrance checkpoints? How long do the queues get?
- Should visitors start entering the stadium 90 min or rather 120 min before kick-off?
- How many ticket control lanes or bag checkpoints are needed?
- How should visitors leave the stadium again to avoid overcrowding?
- What is the capacity limit of the entire stadium system considering all sub-processors and regulations?
The simulation model could easily address these various scenarios, test sensitivities and thus support the definition of a well-founded and reliable operational concept. In particular the video animations helped to understand issues and the effect of proposed mitigation measures.
Result and Benefit
The stakeholders of FC Viktoria Köln highly appreciated the use of simulation in this new field of application. Simulation was referred to as ‘going to the next level and bringing the theoretical concept to operational life’.
One particular benefit of simulation was the right consideration of the time factor, which static spreadsheet calculations can hardly consider in this level of detail with the risk to either overdesign capacities or calculate too short capacities.
Now, with a state-of-the-art approach to analyze the stadium’s capacities, FC Viktoria Köln is confident to welcome its fans again in a safe and convenient way.
