A framework to support massive crowd: A Smart City perspective

In this paper, we present our vision about Hajj pilgrimage experience that we assume to be offered within a smart city perspective. Following our proposed framework, the holy city Makkah will be a smart city where each entity related to pilgrimage will be connected through a smart city framework to offer all the services to each stakeholder in an efficient and smart way. The proposed framework will help providing Hajj and Umrah related services to each entity such as pilgrims, their family members, Hajj agencies, vehicles, municipality, governments, health institutions and emergency handling agencies in a smarter way. All these entities will be connected and will contribute to massive amount of geo-tagged multimedia data that needs cloud to support a very large crowd. Our proposed framework is also envisioned to assist city authorities to (1) improve context-aware pilgrimage service quality, (2) offer improved personalized services through better understanding of pilgrims' (individual and crowd) need, and (3) make Makkah a smart city. We have tested our system through end-user subjects during the Hajj 2014 and Hajj 2015 events, which has helped us in shaping this next generation Hajj and Umrah management system. Our proposed system is envisioned to make Makkah toward a Smart City.