Abstract
All over the world, the crowd management is a big challenge facing the organizations of any event with large number of people. It is clear that this task is becoming more difficult and complicated when the event is larger. In the recent few years, the there are many new technologies developed that can be utilized in crowed management. Among these new technologies is wireless communications, cloud computing, GPS services and many others. Moreover, the wide spread of smart phones and there useful applications made it easier to benefit directly from these technologies. One of the largest worldwide people gathering event is the Pilgrim. Every year, millions of people visit the holy city of Makkah from different countries of the world with different languages and cultural backgrounds. Pilgrim includes certain doings at certain times at certain locations which emphasizes the complexity of crowd management task of the biggest event worldwide. Besides the transportation, housing, and feeding management, there is the dos and donts management of this huge event since it is being a timed and location-based worship. In this research, we utilize the advanced technologies to develop a mobile application to guide the visitors of Makkah (including the elders and those of hearing disability) to perform the correct worship doings and to avoid the worship donts at the holy place of Makkah. The application detects the GPS location of the visitor and sends notifications if he/she commits any donts at that location using a cloud-based decision system. The notifications can be sent as text, image, and video (with deaf sign language integrated). More features of our application, and given that the diversity of Pilgrim, it supports three main languages; Arabic, English, and Urdu, and it is compatible with iOS and Android. The application development process followed the best practices in software engineering that is shown in this paper. To test the application efficiency and functionality, real testing experiments and demos were conducted and presented.