Vehicular Crowd Management: An IoT-Based Departure Control and Navigation System

Large sport and entertainment events such as soccer games or concerts attract an immense number of fans, most of whom use personal vehicles to get to the event. Such a large number of cars presents a “vehicular crowd” that needs to leave in an organized, timely, and safe manner after the event. Combining vehicular crowds with a constrained road networks raises the need for efficient techniques for vehicular crowd management which is a fundamental building block in smart cities. We introduce a novel Vehicle Departure Control (VDC) and navigation system to clear the network in a shorter time and reduce network congestion and system-wide travel time. The proposed system collects network information from a variety of sensory devices: connected vehicles, smartphones, and traffic cameras. Then, it fuses this data to compute the current state conditions of each road link. Based on these parameters, the VDC module determines the allowable vehicle departure rates, and the navigation module computes the system-optimum routes for drivers to take. The proposed system is implemented in a microscopic simulator. The FIFA World Cup 2022 is used as a case study. We compare the proposed system to the Sup-population Dynamic Time-dependent Incremental Traffic Assignment (SFDTIA) which is a typical real-time navigation system that is currently in use by commercial systems. The results show that our optimum navigation and departure control reduced the network clearance time on average by 16%, and by 37% in certain extreme conditions.