WSN-based Interactive Dynamic Maps for Guidance in Al-Masjid Al-Haram

With the rapid increase of countries population worldwide, crowd management is becoming more and more important issue all over the world. The importance of location determination is even becoming more critical especially during the events with large numbers of people that is approximated in millions such as in Pilgrimage and Umra events. Nowadays, there are many new technologies including wireless sensor networks and mobile cloud computing that can be utilized to provide useful applications and services. Pilgrimage (Al-Hajj) and Umra are the largest gathering events for the Muslims in the holy city Makkah from all over the world. Individuals who want to perform pilgrimage or Umra rituals should do specific worship tasks in specific locations and time periods. Every year more than three million Muslims come to Makkah to perform Pilgrimage during Al-Hajj months and more than 13 million Muslims perform Umra in a calendar year. This situation requires secure and safe management for these crowds. In this research, we developed a mobile application that provides dynamic interactive maps to facilitate and assist the performance of pilgrimage and Umra. After the visitor specify the desired destination in and around Makkah, the application detects his/her GPS location and generates dynamic interactive map giving the best path to reach the desired destination. The path determination is based on the crowdedness percentage values which are derived from wireless sensor network that cover the area. So, the lowest-cost path is provided to the user from his current location to the desired destination. The generated best path is viewed as an interactive map. Also, there is audio description for this path to help elder people. Our application is compatible with Android and iOS operating systems. We followed the Software Engineering design principles including the Unified Modeling Language standards during the application development process. Many demos and experiments were performed to test the functionality and performance of the application.