Vibration engineers feel the rock
BBC: Engineers develop a vibration monitoring system to get a better idea of how stadia act under the stress of crowds.
Putting a human behavioral pattern to curve-fit is worse than predicting natural forces like waves. The only way is to collect vast amount of data to find a pattern or a set of patterns for an in-depth dynamic stress analysis. It is quite difficult, if not impossible, to find a dynamic natural period of the crowd to keep it out of sync from resonating and creating the damage. Because the design needs to be generic while the crowd at different events is not, this is a major challenge. So in a sense, this is a breakthrough from the fine folks at University of Sheffield.