Toward Understanding Crowd Mobility in Smart Cities through the Internet of Things

TL;DR

This paper explores how IoT technologies, especially a new interoperable platform, can enhance understanding and management of crowd mobility in smart cities through integrated systems and pilot studies.

Contribution

It introduces the FIESTA-IoT platform for crowd management and demonstrates its application through integrated IoT systems and pilot studies in two cities.

Findings

Successful deployment of IoT systems for crowd analysis in two cities

Shared insights improve crowd management strategies

Demonstrated feasibility of interoperable IoT platforms in smart cities

Abstract

Understanding crowd mobility behaviors would be a key enabler for crowd management in smart cities, benefiting various sectors such as public safety, tourism and transportation. This article discusses the existing challenges and the recent advances to overcome them and allow sharing information across stakeholders of crowd management through Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The article proposes the usage of the new federated interoperable semantic IoT platform (FIESTA-IoT), which is considered as "a system of systems". The platform can support various IoT applications for crowd management in smart cities. In particular, the article discusses two integrated IoT systems for crowd mobility: 1) Crowd Mobility Analytics System, 2) Crowd Counting and Location System (from the SmartSantander testbed). Pilot studies are conducted in Gold Coast, Australia and Santander, Spain to fulfill various requirements such as providing online and offline crowd mobility analyses with various sensors in different regions. The analyses provided by these systems are shared across applications in order to provide insights and support crowd management in smart city environments.