Real-time crowd management for cultural heritage events: A case study on carnival parades

Abstract

Many of public authorities are acknowledging the opportunity to invest into the development of intelligent infrastructures in order to offer a wide spectrum of smart services to their citizens. The development of such services supports a two-fold purpose: citizens enjoy high quality services with the minimum cost for the public authorities. The transition from traditional cities to smart cities that offer smart services to their citizens benefits various aspects of human activities like cultural heritage. Efficient management of urban cultural heritage should play a vital role within a smart city strategy. Carnivals are a popular manifestation of urban cultural heritage that attracts large crowds of people. The successful organization of a carnival and especially its most significant event, the carnival parade, would be more beneficial if an intelligent environment could be established to guide the effort. In this work, we demonstrate a system that addresses to public authorities' officials needs concerning the efficient planning and management of carnival parades. The proposed system design uses a combination of technologies from dedicated mobile applications and easy-to-use online interfaces to complex estimation algorithms that analyze collected data in real-time. The system provides accurate suggestions to event managers in order to help them make sound decisions on-the-fly during the parade (crowd management in terms of safety, spectator perceived usefulness and entertainment) or critical planning decisions prior the carnival parade (cost effectiveness concerning personnel management). We demonstrate system strength through a series of routine scenarios that occur when planning and conducting a carnival parade and we perform a three-level evaluation process to assess system services from various aspects.