Big Data Framework for Crowd Monitoring in Large Crowded Events

Abstract

The management of large events with hundreds of thousands of individuals has remained a challenge over the years. Crushes and stampedes occurring in the events of mass gathering have swallowed many valuable lives around the world. Considering the substantial advancement in positional tracking, wearable technology, and wireless communication, many event organizers are embracing the use of these technologies to get assistance in managing large events. Intelligent monitoring of crowd movement and timely analysis of evolving conditions may aid in early detection of critical situations. The current research aims to propose a big data resource framework to model, simulate, and visualize the crowd conditions for actual venue settings. A distributed framework has been presented to monitor the movement and interaction of individuals in large crowded events through localized sensing and geospatial analysis of massive positional data. The pilgrimage (Hajj) has been considered as a case study for demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The proposed framework has been with the help of synthetic data that covered some useful and frequent scenarios based on the case study of pilgrimage (hajj), which is an annual event involving more than a million people.