Literature Review of Crowd Management: A Hajj Case Study

Jihen Fourati

, Brahim Issaoui

2,3

and Kamel Zidi

3,4

Faculty of Science Gafsa, Gafsa, Tunisia

University of Manouba, National School of Computer Sciences, Tunisia

Laboratoire Complex Outstanding Systems Modeling Optimization and Supervision (COSMOS),

Research Unit Systems for Smart Optimization and Intelligent Engineering (SSOIE), Tunisia

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

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

Simulation

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

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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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