Thursday 28th of March 2024
 

Software Evaluation for Crowd Evacuation - Case Study: Al-Masjid An-Nabawi


Fazilah Haron, Yasser M. Alginahi, Muhammad N. Kabir and Ali I. Mohamed

Disaster preparation and management, such as emergency evacuation, is very essential for public places. This is especially true for Al-Masjid An-Nabawi which accommodates millions of Muslims around the world during Umrah and Hajj seasons. This paper describes the evaluation process carried out to determine the most suitable software for the purpose of studying the evacuation process of Al-Masjid An-Nabawi. This process starts by identifying the project requirements such as the scope and nature of the project, information and data available (e.g. floor-plan, total occupancy of the mosque), duration of the project and the budget. This is then followed by the survey on all available crowd simulation software. Assessments were carried out in terms of degree of validation, background nature of the software, the models used and features available. These were among the main criteria used in short-listing the potential software to be purchased. Observations and identifications on congestion-prone areas, as case studies, were also performed.

Keywords: Crowd simulation software, Hajj, Al-Masjid An-Nabawi, evacuation

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Fazilah Haron
Fazilah Haron received her B.Sc. (in Computer Science) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A. and her Ph.D. (in Parallel Computing) from the University of Leeds, U.K. She is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, and currently on secondment at Taibah University, Madinah, Saudi Arabia. Her research interests include modeling and simulation of crowd, parallel and distributed processing, and grid computing. She has published more than 60 papers, nationally and internationally, out of which more than15 are on the research on crowd at the Masjid Al-Haram and Masjid An-Nabawi.

Yasser M. Alginahi
Yasser M. Alginahi, Senior member: IEEE, Senior member IACSIT, earned a Ph.D., in electrical engineering from the University of Windsor, Canada. Currently, he is at the Dept. of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Engineering, Taibah University. His current research interests are Pattern Recognition (OCR, Face recognition), crowd/traffic management and e-learning technologies. He is a licensed Professional Engineer and a member of Professional Engineers Ontario, Canada (PEO). He has executed several scientific projects in the field of pattern recognition, document analysis and crowd/traffic management. He is an editorial board member of several international referred journals. He has over 30 research publications and technical reports to his credit.

Muhammad N. Kabir
Muhammad Nomani Kabir, received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Braunschweig, Germany. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Taibah University in KSA. His research interests include issues related to numerical methods, crowd/traffic management embedded systems and combustion engines.

Ali I. Mohamed
Ali I. Mohamed has his masters and PhD degrees in industrial engineering from the University of Windsor, Canada. He worked as a consultant to the automotive industry in both Canada and the US. Dr. Mohamed is an Assistant Professor at the Industrial Engineering Department, University of Taibah in Madinah, KSA, with research interest in crowd management.


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