InControl Joins SENTRY Industry Advisory Board to Advance Safety and Security in Crowded Places
InControl has joined the Industry Advisory Board of SENTRY, the Soft Target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat Reality Center of Excellence led by Northeastern University.
The collaboration brings together SENTRY’s research and expertise in protecting soft targets and crowded places with InControl’s experience in simulation, digital twins, crowd dynamics, and operational decision support.
As an Industry Advisory Board member, InControl will contribute its expertise to help connect emerging research with practical applications for security, emergency management, and crowd safety.
What is SENTRY?
SENTRY is a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence led by Northeastern University. Its mission focuses on advancing research, technologies, and decision-support capabilities that help protect soft targets and crowded places.
SENTRY brings together researchers, industry partners, government organizations, and security practitioners to address complex security challenges and help translate research into solutions that can be applied in real-world environments.
Its Industry Advisory Board plays an important role in this process by bringing practical expertise into the research community and helping identify opportunities where emerging technologies can support security professionals and other stakeholders.
SENTRY Research
InControl is supporting research led by SENTRY researcher Dr. Subhadeep Chakraborty focused on crowd dynamics, evacuation planning, and decision-support systems. The research combines InControl’s pedestrian simulation capabilities with optimized routing technology to work toward decision-support tools for soft-target protection.
InControl also contributed to SENTRY’s Strategic Initiatives Virtual Workshop in February 2026. During a session on crowd evacuation, Gary Gardner, Vice President & Safety & Security Applications Director at InControl, discussed how simulation can be used to visualize complex scenarios, evaluate emergency response strategies, and strengthen preparedness.
As Gardner explained in SENTRY’s Industry Advisory Board Member Spotlight, the organizations address different but closely connected parts of the resilience and emergency-management lifecycle. SENTRY focuses on understanding threats, preparedness, resilience, and the development of new technologies, while InControl provides an environment in which concepts and strategies can be tested, validated, optimized, and operationalized before real-world implementation.
Understanding Crowds Before Events Happen
For organizations responsible for stadiums, arenas, transportation hubs, events, public spaces, and other crowded environments, many critical questions concern situations that cannot simply be tested in the real world.
How quickly can a venue be evacuated under different circumstances? Where could dangerous crowd densities develop? What happens when an exit becomes unavailable? How does a security checkpoint affect pedestrian flow? And how should people and resources be routed when conditions suddenly change?
Simulation and digital twin technology provide a way to explore these questions in a virtual environment.
InControl develops simulation software and provides simulation services that allow organizations to model the movement of people through complex environments, analyze potential risks, and compare alternative strategies before implementing them in the real world.
Pedestrian Dynamics®: Simulating Crowd Behavior
At the center of InControl’s crowd simulation capabilities is Pedestrian Dynamics®, an agent-based simulation platform for modeling, analyzing, and visualizing pedestrian movement.
Instead of treating a crowd as a single flow, Pedestrian Dynamics® models individual pedestrians and their interactions within an environment. This makes it possible to reproduce and analyze phenomena such as congestion, bottlenecks, route choices, queues, and changing crowd densities.
Organizations can use the software to evaluate scenarios including:
- Crowd ingress and egress
- Emergency evacuation
- Crowd management strategies
- Security checkpoints and screening configurations
- Infrastructure and exit capacity
- Alternative routing strategies
- Changes in layouts, barriers, and access points
These scenarios can be evaluated without interrupting actual operations or exposing people to risk.
In addition to providing the software, InControl supports organizations with simulation consultancy and expertise, from collecting and interpreting data to building simulation models and translating the results into actionable insights.
From Simulation to Operational Decision Support
InControl also develops TruVenue®, a digital twin solution created specifically for sports and entertainment venues.
Where Pedestrian Dynamics® provides extensive modeling and simulation capabilities, TruVenue® makes simulation-based insights accessible within an operational venue environment. It enables organizations to evaluate crowd behavior and explore different configurations and scenarios using a digital representation of their venue.
This creates opportunities to use simulation not only during the design of infrastructure, but also as part of planning, preparedness, training, and operational decision-making.
From Research to Real-World Application
Protecting crowded places requires more than understanding what has happened in the past. Security professionals, planners, venue operators, and emergency services increasingly need tools that allow them to explore what could happen next.
By combining research into threats, resilience, evacuation, and decision support with simulation and digital twin technology, new concepts can be evaluated in realistic virtual environments before they are deployed in the real world.
Through its role on SENTRY’s Industry Advisory Board, InControl looks forward to contributing its expertise in crowd simulation, digital twins, and operational decision support while collaborating with researchers, government organizations, industry partners, and security practitioners toward a shared objective: making crowded places safer and better prepared for the unexpected.
