Abstract
The problem of managing large crowds has many aspects and has been reported in the literature. One of these aspects is the distribution of supplies such as food and water in especially when the targeted region is overcrowded. Some of the challenges is to plan the locations of food and water supply centres in such a way to achieve multiple objective functions such as the type of food and the shortest distance to customer. A practical example of this problem is the food distribution and food cart location in the region of Mena (also known as Tent City, in Saudi Arabia) during the yearly pilgrimage season. In this work, we propose a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for positioning services in the region of Mena (Mecca – Saudi Arabia) that covers an area of approximately 20 square kilometres during the pilgrimage season. The architecture proposes an optimal service selection as well as a mobile food cart positioning algorithm based on client pre-set profiles to achieve multiple objective functions for the clients as well as the service providers. Some of these objective functions are the least waiting time to be served, the shortest distance to service, the lowest cost, and the maximum profit for the service provider.
Highlights
Each year, millions of pilgrims travel to Mecca from various places/countries all over the world to perform their once-in-a-life-time duty of pilgrimage (Hajj)
One of the regions that pilgrims pass through and stay for three days is called the region of Mena, a.k.a. the “Tent City”
Large crowd management has been addressed in several works in the literature [4][5][6]
Summary
Millions of pilgrims travel to Mecca from various places/countries all over the world to perform their once-in-a-life-time duty of pilgrimage (Hajj). The trip lasts for at least five days in which pilgrims move from a place to another within an area of approximately 50 square kilometers (12x4 Km) Managing such a large number of people, that reaches two million, is a significant challenge to the event organizers. A variety of services are offered to those pilgrims including, the supply of food and water, accommodations, healthcare, guidance, and many others Facilitating such services for such a large number of people and in such a relatively small area with dense population is a major undertaking. A dire question is where to locate those food mobile trucks and water supply containers so that an optimal service is provided to minimize the effort and time for pilgrims. Since the area of Mena has some permanent but insufficient installations for such service provisioning, this architecture proposes the smart use of mobile service carts to provide the required services.
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