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

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: the Crowd Mobility Analytics System and the Crowd Counting and Location System (from the SmartSantander testbed). Pilot studies are conducted in the 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.