Lap2Go: Managing start waves for mass running events

Abstract

Lap2Go is the portuguese timekeeping leader for sport events (e.g. running, trail running, MTB). The company manages more than 150 events by year, with thousands of participants using chips to sort out the results of all the participants for each event. Sometimes the road running events use start waves as segmentation. Each wave is based on the running rythm of each participant (e.g. under 40 minutes in a 10 Km event). This decision is taken by the Organization and sometimes wrong decisions have big impact on the race in the middle of the course. A kind of traffic jam slows down the running rythm of each participant and it can be dangerous. The main challenge is to optimize the number of participants per wave and the time between each wave to avoid participants accumulation in a specific point of the course of the event.