Crowd Management: The Overlooked Component of Smart Transportation Systems

Governmental, scientific, and industrial initiatives are developing a new era of smart transportation systems, ambitiously aimed at overcoming the limitations of current transportation infrastructures. These initiatives are designed to cooperate safer, efficient, eco-friendly, and enjoyable transportation for people and goods in large urban areas. However, current research on smart transportation systems has neglected a fundamental building block: smart crowd management. In a smart transportation system, the smart crowd management component will be demanded for identifying and controlling the congestion that can occur during commutes and routine travel. In this article, we discuss the incompleteness of current smart transportation system initiatives as they are not implementing a smart crowd management component. Moreover, we identify and discuss the basic steps for the design of solutions for smart crowd management, as well as the main challenges that must be addressed. Finally, we provide future research directions for the design of smart crowd management solutions and infrastructures for smart transportation systems.