Literature Review of Crowd Management: A Hajj Case Study
Jihen Fourati
1
, Brahim Issaoui
2,3
and Kamel Zidi
3,4
1
Faculty of Science Gafsa, Gafsa, Tunisia
2
University of Manouba, National School of Computer Sciences, Tunisia
3
Laboratoire Complex Outstanding Systems Modeling Optimization and Supervision (COSMOS),
Research Unit Systems for Smart Optimization and Intelligent Engineering (SSOIE), Tunisia
4
University of Tabuk, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia
Keywords: Crowd Management, Pilgrimage, Congestion Control, Hajj.
Abstract: Pilgrimage is one of the five pillars of Islam, which is a duty every Muslim should perform once during his
lifetime. Over than two millions Muslims from all the world gather in Makkah for one of the world's largest
pilgrimages. All those pilgrims are obligated to be accommodated at Hajj ritual sites, which are the Kaaba,
Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah. With this huge number of pilgrims in the holy city, managing the crowd is a
complicated task, especially in the geographical area for the movement of pilgrims, the fixed underlying
road-network infrastructure between the different worship places, the annually increasing number of
pilgrims and also the short duration of Hajj. As a result of this, huge crowd and difficulties in control have
led to fatal accidents among the pilgrims. By the last decade, overcrowding management became a big
challenge for the Saudi Arabian authorities and Hajj organizers. Scientists have started research projects to
provide several methodologies for crowd monitoring and estimation of its density. In this work, we tried to
present a literature review about the Hajj in order to help scientists for future contribution and have lots
information about this new field of research.
1 INTRODUCTION
Pilgrimage is an important event organized every
year to enable Muslims practice one of five pillars of
Islam.
In fact, with the increasing numbers of pilgrims,
the Saudi authority has faced many problems that
lead to hazardous accidents.
Indeed, it’s compulsory to ensure the safety of
pilgrims from different countries, so it’s urgent to
adopt strategies for successful crowd management.
Obviously, we have to debate about the problems
that face the Saudi authority in the management of
the largest event ever: Pilgrimage.
Among these problems we can mention:
Fixed underlying road-network infrastructure
between the different religious places:
The limited geographical areas in the holy city
places (Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifa) are one of the
most problems that face the authority Saudi at Hajj
event management.
The lack of respect from the pilgrims to the
schedules:
Some of the pilgrims do not respect the schedules
proposed by the authority of Hajj.
Annually increasing number of pilgrims:
The increasing number of pilgrims each year and the
excessive wait at places of worship inevitably lead
to the creation of many disasters because of the
inability of the Saudi authority to anticipate these
catastrophes.
Lost pilgrims in Hajj ritual places:
Every year, thousands of pilgrims got lost or
missing, this problem due to the overcrowding at the
Hajj holy locations.
In addition, (Amro and Nijem, 2012) illustrated
that around 30.000 pilgrims in 2011 got missing
during hajj various rituals. This problem occurs
especially for the foreign pilgrims and children and
the people who do not know any other language of
communication other their mother tongue.
Lack of guidance at Hajj ritual places:
346
Fourati, J., Issaoui, B. and Zidi, K.
Literature Review of Crowd Management: A Hajj Case Study.
DOI: 10.5220/0006472103460351
In Proceedings of the 14th Inter national Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2017) - Volume 1, pages 346-351
ISBN: 978-989-758-263-9
Copyright © 2017 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
The lack of directional information is a
significant problem. The foreign pilgrims who come
for the first time to perform the pilgrimage need the
information about the holy sites around Makkah.
In this section we discussed some problems
pushed us to study the crowd management for the
pilgrimage. In section 2 of this investigation, we
present hajj crowd management history. In section 3,
we devoted the practical works in this field. Then
state of the art studies that contributed to resolve
overcrowding management also to avoid the
stampede's are depicted in section 4, from which
conclusions are drawn in section 5.
2 HAJJ CROWD MANAGEMENT
HISTORY
The most accurate description of the terms crowd
management and crowd control are introduced by
(Fruin, 1993), in which the author defined the term
crowd management as a systematic planning for the
orderly movement and assembly of members as
people. The crowd control is the limitation of crowd
behaviour.As an example of the crowd management
events, we can note the pilgrimage to Mecca as one
of the most visible manifestations of overcrowding.
The pilgrimage is an annual Islamic pilgrimage
that takes place on the last month of the Hijri
calendar only for five days period, starting on the
eighth of the Dhu al-Hijjah and ending on the
twelfth of the Dhu al-Hijjah. In these few days, the
pilgrims must perform the hajj by practicing all the
rituals that Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him)
has formalized. We found in (Feinberg and Alwan,
2008) the activities and dates of pilgrimage which
are details in table 1.
The above table shows the acts of worship of
pilgrimage and their dates, obviously, the short
duration of pilgrimage have a degree of complexity,
will usually have an impact on the event
management plan.
All hajj activities should be carried out by about
3 million pilgrims which are not only bound to time
but also to the place. Indeed, despite the efforts of
the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah in the management
of pilgrims, the lack of respect for the pilgrims led to
many disastrous results of the crowd movement.
Authors (Al-Nuaim and Al-Masry 2012) have
summarized disasters that happened at Hajj events in
the two last decades due to the human bottlenecks,
crowd of pilgrims and unsuccessful Hajj
management (Table 2). In fact, we update the
“History of Hajj tragedies” by adding some new
information.
Table 1: Schedule of Hajj.
* Hijri date
No of days
Activities
12/8 or before
Varies
a. Bathe and wear a 2 piece white
garment.
b. Verbal declaration of intending to
perform Hajj.
c. Perform the Tawaf **
12/8
1 day
a. Travel at dawn to Arafat.
b. Travel to Muzdalifah after sunset
and collect 70 pebbles (optional).
12/9
1 day
a. Travel at the dawn to Mina.
b. Visit Makkah to perform the
Tawaf **and the Sa’y.
c. Return to Mina.
12/11 to 12/13
2 to 3 day
a. Sleep in Mina for 2 to 3 nights.
b. Stone the symbol of Satan.
c. Sacrifice an animal.
d. Return to Makkah
e. Perform the Farewell Tawaf**.
*
Hijri calendar: Islamic lunar calendar, which is comprised of 12
months, with 354 days per year.
**Tawaf: is one of the Islamic rituals of pilgrimage. During this
ritual, Muslims going round Al-Kaaba seven times in a
counterclockwise direction.
Table 2: A history of Hajj tragedies.
Date
Accidents
Casualties
Place
1975
Fire
Death of 200
pilgrims
Camps for
pilgrims near
Makkah
1990
Suffocation
Death of 1,426
pilgrims
Inside a
pedestrian tunnel
1994
Stampede
Death of 270
pilgrims
Al-Jamarat in
Mina
1998
Death of 118
pilgrims
2001
Death of 35
pilgrims
2003
Death of 14
pilgrims
2004
Death of 251
pilgrims
2006
Death of 346
pilgrims
2015
Death of
2,411pilgrims
Mina.
In view of the multiplicity of causes of
overcrowding in the Hajj, the Saudi authorities are
called upon to find practical solutions to overcome
these problems. Therefore, we find in the next part
some of the concrete works to overcome the
disasters facing the pilgrims when performing the
rituals of Hajj and especially the problem of
overcrowding.
Literature Review of Crowd Management: A Hajj Case Study
347
3 PRACTICAL WORKS
The annual Islamic Pilgrimage is the biggest
gathering of its kind in the world. In this annual
event, millions of Muslims from around the globe
gather in the same place to perform a set of acts of
worship in Makkah. Managing crowd is a complex
task for the Saudi Arabian government. In fact, the
number of pilgrims rose each year, which make the
problem got worse. For example, the planning of the
movement of pilgrims from one holy site to another
during the course of Hajj is a big challenge that
faces the authority, especially with the increasing
number of pilgrims from the globe and with the
movement of mass (vehicle, pedestrian) more
problems continually arise. The Saudi authority has
broad responsibility for the protection of the area’s
visitors. In reaction to past crowding problems and
this forecast growth, the local authorities have made
a set of steps to increase the content of the holy
places in and around Makkah.
Recently, scientists have begun working on
research project to improve the mass movement that
helps in the crowd management. For example, the
authority hasn't allowed the small cars to enter
Makkah environs during peak periods. As for the
management of the transportation of pilgrims to
Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah, Saudi Arabia
undertook to expand a railway network by the
construction of a monorail "Al Mashaaer Al
Mugaddassah Metro Line" to solve the problem of
heavy bottleneck congestion traffic and to improve
the antiquated logistics infrastructure. The line was
opened in November 2010 and became fully
operational in November 2011 (Reffat, 2012).
For instance, (Sheffi and Mahmassani, 1981)
proposed a model, one of the first of its kind, to
study how masses of people behaved in certain
situations.
As such Dr Felemban’s centre is developing a
bracelet for tracking the pilgrims and to provide
guidance at Hajj ritual places and an electronic
health record.
Moreover, there are approximately 800
surveillance cameras have been installed to ensure
the safety of pilgrims.
Given the fact that the number of pilgrims is
growing, the pilgrimage authorities work so hard to
ensure the safety of the crowds.
Recently, many scientists have proposed making
structural refinements to the geometry of sacred sites
(Algadhi et al., 2002) organizing crowds streets in
holy sites (Al-Abideen, 2005).
This proposal has been implemented as indicated
(Pin et al., 2010) in its work.
The Jamaraat Bridge was rebuilt with a new
design in order to improve the infrastructure and
accommodate the largest amount of pilgrims in the
stoning of the devil ritual of the Hajj on the bridge.
The idea of this new design is to increase the
number of visitors by adding multiple floors that
made it a multi-level design.
In the next section, we will describe the
empirical studies which done to contribute to the
resolution of the crowd management problems
related the pilgrimage.
4 LITERATURE REVIEW
4.1 A Hajj Case Study
Many researchers discussed the situation of crowd
management in Mecca, and many efforts by the
authorities have been made to provide safety to
pilgrims during this crowded event. Indeed,
(Khozium et al., 2012) studied the crowd
management of pilgrims using the thermography.
The proposed system is based on two main
components: the information management
component, and the decision support system module.
The information management component
includes data acquisition module via using of several
thermal cameras deployed at critical points on the
target route. It is divided into two modules: the
thermography module and the fuzzy logic module.
The decision support system module generates
different alternatives showing the closed roads, road
priorities, and which group should move through
which road. It is divided into two modules: the
operations research module and the expert system
module. Intelligent agents have been used to treat
this problem by (Mulyana and Gunawan, 2010).
Their system was able to demonstrate more realistic
pilgrims’ behavior for three Hajj rituals, thawaf, sa'i
and jumrah. The three Hajj rituals are modeled in the
form of finite state machine. To compare the real
word data with the simulation result, the authors
based on the replicative validity type.
Negative aspects of intelligent agent research
included about lack of the number of agents to
simulate that can be mitigated by using a more
powerful computer.
The negative aspect about using intelligent agent
is the big numbers of communication between
agents which can provide a time response problem.
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Real world
Figure 1: Replicative validation result.
(Pin et al, 2011), have shown that applying TRIZ
principles in crowd management can be used to
solve the problem. TRIZ was introduced by Genrich
Altshuller and his colleagues in1946. It is the
Russian” Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”
(Mann and Domb, 1999). A fundamental concept in
TRIZ is that a problem is defined by contradictions.
In the case of study of Hajj, the contradiction is
based on the increasing crowd capacity in a
relatively small area, leads to overcrowding; it is one
of the common contradictions in crowd
management. In fact, the research aims to apply the
theory of the resolution of invention-related tasks.
The authors found the contradictions that arise in
the context of crowd management based on a
selection from the 40 principles. They applied three
principles:
a) Principle 1 Segmentation:
- Divide an object into independent parts
- Make an object easy to disassemble
- Increase the degree of fragmentation or
segmentation
Figure 2: Illustration of pedestrians’ segmentation.
b) Principle 7 Nested doll:
- Place one object inside another; place each
object, in turn, inside the other
- Make one part pass through a cavity in the other.
c) Principle 17 Another dimension:
- To move an object in two- or three-dimensional
space
- Use a multi-story arrangement of objects instead
of a single-story arrangement
- Tilt or re-orient the object, lay it on its side
- Use ‘another side’ of a given area.
Figure 3: Illustration of changing building’s dimension.
(Maciej et al., 2011) has proposed an approach
based on optical flow data. In this work, the authors
has introduced a concept of crowd management
system that consider two threads, the analysis of
crowd behavior to detect atypical or dangerous
situations and the second focus on detecting a hold-
ups in the door.
In the same context, we also attached importance
to the bottlenecks congestion traffic that can be
occurred on the roads interconnecting the holy city
places.
(Omar et al., 2014), the objective of author's
proposal is to evaluate congestive bottleneck areas in
the Mecca road network interconnecting holy sites
during the pilgrimage period through the use of
computational modeling and computer networking
techniques. However, in this work, the authors made
several assumptions to evaluate the movement of the
pilgrims' traffic.
To sum up, a queue/polling model was proposed
to the traffic control that uses an adaptive control
algorithm that calculates traffic decisions in
response to real-time variable congestion levels.
It is also possible to take advantage of the
following researches, which are related to solving
bottlenecks congestion traffic, that it is possible to
inspire from it.
(Koushik et al., 2011) proposed an intelligent
traffic congestion monitoring and measurement
system called TrafficMonitor to monitor and
measure traffic congestion using the probe vehicle.
The congestion detection algorithm introduced in
this investigation based on the calculation of the
vehicle speed on a section of road and the average
waiting time of road vehicles.
RFID and GSM based system was adopted for
detect and manage automatically the congestion on
any road leading to a junction in real time. This
system was proposed by (Siuli et al., 2010).
Nevertheless, the RFID reader used in this work to
calculate the number of vehicles and to determine
Pedestrian
Literature Review of Crowd Management: A Hajj Case Study
349
the congestion volume helps only to find the
conjunction but doesn't give any indication for it.
The authors (Stefania Bandini, Fabietti, Pomello,
Manzoni, Vizzari, Manenti, Sartori, Bonomi,
Lembo, Nishinari, Ohtsuka, Shimura, Koshak,
Gutub, Al Azzony) have been involved in the
Crystals Project. Crystals project is a joint research
effort between the Complex Systems and Artificial
Intelligence Research Center of the University of
Milano Bicocca, the Centre of Research Excellence
in Hajj and Omrah and the Research Center for
Advanced Science and Technology of the University
of Tokyo. This project aims to establish an agent-
based pedestrian and crowd modeling approach to
survey the relationship between the contributions of
anthropology and the empirical works of the
research on crowd dynamics. Also, investigate the
influence of heterogeneous groups in the emergent
dynamics.
The objective of Reffat's (Reffat, 2012) proposal
is to develop a framework an intelligent
computational real-time virtual environment model
for efficient crowd management, especially the
vehicles traffic movement and the movement of
pedestrians from Arafat to Muzdalifah, by using
diverse optimization methods and simulation.
Indeed, the limit of the proposed framework is
that the 3D virtual model does not intend for
optimization.
(Stefania et al., 2007) proposed a multi-agent
approach to crowd modeling and simulation, the
guidelines for its adoption to model crowds and
some relevant elements of a simulation
infrastructure for crowd simulation.
(Sonia and Mohamed, 2015), have shown that
Wireless Sensor Network deployment model can be
used to monitor pilgrims and help them in the case
of evacuation process. The proposed model
determines anchor positions within the worship
areas that facilities the evacuation process and
ensures the survival of persons.
In the next section, we will describe methods and
proposed works concerning other cases of study.
4.2 Other Case Studies
Recently, there have been inherent dangers
associated with every large public gathering.
Thousands of people have perished in stampedes,
fires and other incidents resulting from the
overpopulation and mismanagement.
By digging more in the literature, we found
another cases of study in the field of crowd
management.
(Bisojit et al., 2016) have proposed a sensor
system to sense level of occupancy in each train
compartment. In the system, the level of occupancy
will be shown on a large indicator on the platform
before the train arrives on station via ZIGBEE.
(Andrew et al., 2015) have used an agent-based
modeling and simulation (ABMS) technique for
developing a decision support system called
"SimCrowdControl".
The decision support system uses a realistic
crowd model developed based on social science
research studies. It employs a heterogeneous crowd
model with 3 kinds of agents: Instigator agent,
susceptible agent and Guardian agent.
In this investigation, we have studied the
problem of hajj crowd management. Actually, the
above approaches of several technologies addressing
the problem of crowd management provided
auspicious potentials of utilizing diverse systems as
means for improving the pilgrims movements and
decreasing the crowd congestion will be accordingly
enhanced. Therefore, technological solutions can be
useful to control the crowds, but also it has a
negative impact if that is used in a standalone mode
as almost in the case of religious gatherings.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Managing crowd is a substantial challenge,
especially when religious perceptions take into
consideration. However the disasters like the one
which took place at Datia district in Madhya Pradesh
in India in 2013 hundreds of people killed (Local
Authorities, Administrators and Organizers, 2014).
Also in 2015, many people were crushed and
trampled to death in the Saudi Arabia hajj stampede
(G. Keith Still). Given the difficulties of this
problem, we have addressed this issue in this
investigation.
The literature review of this study presented the
problem of crowd management in human and
industrial standpoint in which we have mentioned
the most famous overcrowding event in Makkah
(Pilgrimage) experiences in order to clarify the
proposed objectives. With thus use of technologies
discussed in this article could be deployed to
overcome Hajj problems.
Despite, with the empirical point of view in
which we have analyzed the research works that
contributed to solving the problem of crowd
incidents such as overcrowding and bottleneck, we
conclude that the majority of research works has
dealt with the problem in a static context (offline)
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using resolution methods that are either exact or
approximate. This does not reflect the reality.
So, the problem of crowd management must be
studied in such a way to get closer to the reality and
in order to create decision support systems.
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