Problem Solving in Crowd Management Using Heuristic Approach

There are many problems that procedural algorithms can solve efficiently. However, these algorithms are sometimes too slow to abide by the time available for performing the solution; other times, it is impossible to get a solution using procedural algorithms. A heuristic method is a practical approach that can reach an approximation of an efficient solution where the optimum is not guaranteed. Heuristic techniques are applied in many real-world problems, including crowd management; using heuristic-based models helped to comprehend crowd behavior better and increase simulation reliability. This paper reviews many heuristic-related articles to gather the aspects of the topic in one place and clear the fuzziness to make it easy to comprehend. The paper covers some of the previous works with similar approaches and presents state-of-the-art heuristic solutions for real-world problems. These techniques are discussed under three classifications: simple heuristics, meta-heuristics, and hyper-heuristics. Most importantly, the paper explores the heuristic role in crowd field problems concluding that heuristics are primarily applied in modeling when it comes to the Crowd field. It investigates different heuristics for crowd management. The main intent of this review is to establish a comprehensive understanding of heuristics-related operations in the crowd management field. Moreover, it aims to support other researchers’ future work and fill research gaps by highlighting the absence of crowd problems from heuristics literature and the limitations of each heuristics approach.