Yes there is lots of research on this, years ago I was in a project with a group (CASA) at UCL (Leeds) where this is one of their main topics of study - https:/

Yes there is lots of research on this, years ago I was in a project with a group (CASA) at UCL (Leeds) where this is one of their main topics of study - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/casa/ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/casa/ . If you google e.g. 'agent based simulation pedestrian' you'll find 100's of papers doing this at various scales, as well as dedicated software packages to simulate for studies of shopping mall layout, sports stadium layout etc. Years ago I entertained starting a business in this field - it was essentially exactly what you say, doing analysis for events as part of their risk assessment to see if event locations are safe under various patterns of (aggregate) visitor movement. At the time (15ish years ago?) that wasn't really done for anything but the largest events. The idea never really went anywhere but it's an interesting topic I still think about every now and then.