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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
A review on technological advancements in crowd management
Deepak Sharma
1,2
•Amol P. Bhondekar
1,2
•A. K. Shukla
1,2
•C. Ghanshyam
1,2
Received: 9 August 2016 / Accepted: 2 November 2016 / Published online: 18 November 2016
ÓSpringer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Abstract With more and more people attending public
gatherings, and with a continuous rise in crowd density in
urban areas, the management of crowd has become more
challenging than ever before. Every year, many people lose
their lives due to inefficient crowd planning and manage-
ment. Crowd management is an interdisciplinary area, and
it requires understanding of engineering and technological
aspects, along with an understanding of crowd behavior
and crowd flow management, i.e. psychological and soci-
ological aspects. This paper presents a broad, but not
exhaustive overview of the recent technological advance-
ments in the area of crowd planning and monitoring tech-
niques for an effective crowd management system. It
discusses the crowd modeling aspects during the planning
of crowded scenario, and the technological advancements
in crowd data acquisition techniques [based on Vision,
Wireless/Radio-Frequency (RF) and Web/Social-media
data mining technologies] during execution of crowded
event. The paper also considers technological applications
in some highly crowded scenarios on earth as case studies,
along with future research directions in the area.
Keywords Crowd management Crowd data acquisition
Crowd modeling Wireless technologies Computational
instrumentation Data mining
1 Introduction
In a recent stampede during Hajj on September 24, 2015,
more than 700 people died and more than 850 got injured
(MOH-SA 2015). Every year, hundreds of lives are lost and
thousands get injured in crowded events due to insufficient
and/or inefficient crowd management measures. Based on
an UN report (UN 2014), in 1950, 30% of the world’s
population was urban; which became 54% in 2014; and
66% of the world’s population is projected to be urban by
2050. Considering example of a developing nation, e.g.
India; As on July 1, 2014 three Indian cities: Delhi,
Mumbai and Kolkata were ranked at number 2, 6 and 14
respectively in the ranking of global urban agglomerations
based on population size, with prospects of further increase
in population in future, e.g. population of Delhi (25 million
in 2014) is projected to rise swiftly to 36 million by 2030.
In Mumbai suburban railway (India) about 8 million
commuters travel every day, which faces the highest pas-
senger density in the world (MRVCL 2016). Consideration
of crowd management is not only required for managing
crowded events, but it has become equally important while
planning public infrastructure in urban areas, where a high
crowd density is expected.
Crowd management is a complex process, some of its
important elements are crowd modeling for planning the
event and infrastructure; crowd data acquisition during
crowd monitoring; data analysis for decision making;
provisioning and applying crowd control measures, etc.
Crowd management requires a collaboration of various
areas of engineering and science, e.g. physics, computer
science, civil engineering, psychology, management, etc.
The crowd modeling, based on simulating the crowd
scenarios under various circumstances, can help in devising
better crowd control and management strategies. The
&Deepak Sharma
deepakskc@yahoo.com; deepaksharma@csio.res.in
1
CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation,
Sector-30C, Chandigarh 160030, India
2
Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, New Delhi,
India
123
J Ambient Intell Human Comput (2018) 9:485–495
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-016-0432-x
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