Abstract
Monitoring and understanding traffic behaviour plays a vital role to handle the daily needs of the users in a smart way, especially in highly populated big cities. Events pulling in big crowds like religious gatherings or sports events, clashes between vehicular traffic movements arc unavoidable which results in stoppages and hazardous conditions for the pilgrims, sometimes causes disorder and jam. The problem becomes more challenging when millions of users move from one place to another in a specific duration of time during Hajj. Hajj is one of the pillars of Islam where 3+ millions of pilgrims gather in Makkah, Saudi Arabia to perform their rituals. In this paper, we present an interactive platform to understand the movement of buses during Hajj using large scale GPS traces. We collected the GPS traces of more than 20,000 buses for 60 days for the movement of pilgrims to perform their Spatio-temporal rituals. An interactive platform is developed to store big spatial data and visualize the same. We analyzed the data and identified the routes, parking areas allocated to each establishment and commuting lime of routes for different establishments. The knowledge extracted will be beneficial for stakeholders and decision-makers to enhance pilgrims mobility during the hajj by developing an intelligent transportation system such as scheduling, evacuation, optimizing the number of buses or roads for each establishment.