A review on technological advancements in crowd management

With more and more people attending public gatherings, and with a continuous rise in crowd density in urban areas, the management of crowd has become more challenging than ever before. Every year, many people lose their lives due to inefficient crowd planning and management. Crowd management is an interdisciplinary area, and it requires understanding of engineering and technological aspects, along with an understanding of crowd behavior and crowd flow management, i.e. psychological and sociological aspects. This paper presents a broad, but not exhaustive overview of the recent technological advancements in the area of crowd planning and monitoring techniques for an effective crowd management system. It discusses the crowd modeling aspects during the planning of crowded scenario, and the technological advancements in crowd data acquisition techniques [based on Vision, Wireless/Radio-Frequency (RF) and Web/Social-media data mining technologies] during execution of crowded event. The paper also considers technological applications in some highly crowded scenarios on earth as case studies, along with future research directions in the area.