Abstract
Large gatherings such as concerts, football matches, festivals need an efficient and effective tool to deal with various emergency scenarios. Such events require a proper plan to evacuate the affected areas smoothly and peacefully. The problem of evacuation becomes more complicated when we talk about Raj where 3+ million pilgrims from all over the world gather to perform rituals on specific date and time. In this work-in-progress paper, we present a "Capacity Aware Evacuation Planning using Multimodal Transportation (CAEPM)" platform, to evacuate pilgrims from Mashaer(1) area in case of disaster using multimodal transportation. The mode can be pedestrian, public/private buses and trains. The pilgrims from all over the world are grouped into seven establishments. Specific routes are allocated to each establishment to perform spatio-temporal rituals in Mashaer area. To manage the crowd and avoid stampede, internal roads are closed in Mashaer. To evacuate any area in Mashaer in case of any unfortunate event, it is very necessary to understand the allowed roads and mode of movements. In order to achieve the same, we received large scale GPS data of more than 20,000 buses from Haj 2018, train movement details, and camps assignments from different authorities of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We extracted knowledge from these collected data to identify the bus routes for movements during Haj for different establishments, number of buses assigned to each establishment, pick up points, drop off points, average speed, capacity of train stations, trains and roads using big data platform. We will use this knowledge to develop our novel CAEPM platform. Our proposed platform will provide innovative decision-analysis capabilities to various stakeholders at city and province levels supervising Haj and Umrah activities. Our proposed platform can be handy for pre-planning exercises, thus serving potentially to the control center for managing the Haj event.