Abstract
Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam, is held annually in the month of Dhul Al-Hijjah, the twelfth month, in the Islamic calendar. Pilgrims travel to Makkah and its neighbouring areas—Mina, Muzdalifah, and Arafat. Annually, about 2.5 million pilgrims perform spatiotemporally restricted rituals in these holy places that they must execute to fulfil the pilgrimage. These restrictions make the task of transportation in Hajj a big challenge. The shuttle bus service is an essential form of transport during Hajj due to its easy availability at all stages and ability to transport large numbers. The current shuttle service suffers from operational problems; this can be deduced from the service delays and customer dissatisfaction with the service. This study provides a system to help in planning the operation of the service for one of the Hajj Establishments to improve performance by determining the optimal number of buses and cycles required for each office in the Establishment. We will also present a case study in which the proposed model was applied to the non-Arab Africa Establishment shuttle service. At the same time, we will include the mechanism for extracting the information required in the tested model from the considerably large GPS data of 20,000+ buses in Hajj 2018.
Highlights
Hajj takes place in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most crowded events.Every year, around 2.5 million pilgrims gather from different cultures all over the world to perform rituals restricted in location between Makkah city and Mina, Muzdalifah, and Arafat holy sites, and between the 8th and the 13th of Dhul Al-Hijjah in the Islamic calendar.Based on their nationality, Pilgrims from around the world are split into zones known as Establishments such as Southeast Asia, South Asia, Arab Countries
Around 2.5 million pilgrims gather from different cultures all over the world to perform rituals restricted in location between Makkah city and Mina, Muzdalifah, and Arafat holy sites, and between the 8th and the 13th of Dhul Al-Hijjah in the Islamic calendar
We formulate, the function that estimates the Establishment’s overall service time from individual offices, and the Hajj shuttle bus service optimization problem that solves for the optimal number of buses needed at each office in the Establishment to service with the minimum time
Summary
Hajj takes place in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most crowded events. Every year, around 2.5 million pilgrims gather from different cultures all over the world to perform rituals restricted in location between Makkah city and Mina, Muzdalifah, and Arafat holy sites, and between the 8th and the 13th of Dhul Al-Hijjah in the Islamic calendar. The transportation services available to Hajj pilgrims for movement between the holy sites are walking facilities, regular buses (restricted to single round only), shuttle buses, or the Mashaer train The availability of these services to the pilgrims depends on their availability to the Establishments at the location of each phase of Hajj. The shuttle service was established in 1992 to transport pilgrims by bus between offices on two different holy sites with pre-set cycles and on isolated routes— like those between Arafat and Muzdalifah. They were migrated to big data platform, enriched, filtered, and analysed to extract the shuttle bus service-related data at the Establishment, including the offices’ pick-up and drop-off times, Arafat-Muzdalifah path’s travel times, and the number of pilgrims at the offices. This is followed by the conclusion and suggestions regarding future research on this topic
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