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Improving Pilgrim Safety During the Hajj: An Analytical and Operational Research Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Knut Haase

    (Institut für Verkehrswirtschaft, Universität Hamburg, 20148 Hamburg, Germany)

  • Habib Zain Al Abideen

    (Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs (MOMRA), Riyadh 12261, Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia)

  • Salim Al-Bosta

    (Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs (MOMRA), Riyadh 12261, Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia)

  • Mathias Kasper

    (Institut für Wirtschaft und Verkehr, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany)

  • Matthes Koch

    (Institut für Verkehrswirtschaft, Universität Hamburg, 20148 Hamburg, Germany)

  • Sven Müller

    (Transport Business Economics, University of Applied Sciences Karlsruhe, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany)

  • Dirk Helbing

    (Computational Social Science, ETH Zurich—Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland)

Abstract

The Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Makkah in Saudi Arabia, is one of the largest pedestrian events in the world. Each year, up to four million pilgrims approach the holy sites in the region of Makkah to perform their religious duty. The key ritual, the stoning-of-the-devil, is particularly crowded. Until 2006, several crowd-related disasters led to thousands of casualties. In the aftermath of such a disaster in early 2006, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (MOMRA) launched many projects to prevent future crowd-related accidents. In particular, MOMRA began the development of an operations research (OR)-based decision support system (ORDSS) for crowd management. ORDSS employs a range of tools from OR, analytics, and crowd dynamics. At its core, it implements a scheduling tool and a real-time video tracking system. The video tracking system measures infrastructure utilization, and an integrated series of mixed-integer programs and quadratic programs balance capacity utilization by considering preferred stoning times and infrastructure capacities. The ORDSS provides MOMRA with solutions that enable uncongested and smooth pilgrim flows and extensive real-time reporting. From 2007 to 2014, OR helped stop the tragic loss of human life that resulted from these crowd-related accidents. Unfortunately, a crowd-related disaster, which resulted in hundreds of casualties, occurred during Hajj season 2015; however, for this Hajj season, the authors and MOMRA were no longer in charge of the scheduling and routing recommendations for the stoning-of-the-devil ritual during the Hajj.

Suggested Citation

  • Knut Haase & Habib Zain Al Abideen & Salim Al-Bosta & Mathias Kasper & Matthes Koch & Sven Müller & Dirk Helbing, 2016. "Improving Pilgrim Safety During the Hajj: An Analytical and Operational Research Approach," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 46(1), pages 74-90, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:46:y:2016:i:1:p:74-90
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.2015.0833
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Anders Johansson & Dirk Helbing & Habib Z. Al-Abideen & Salim Al-Bosta, 2008. "From Crowd Dynamics To Crowd Safety: A Video-Based Analysis," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 11(04), pages 497-527.
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    Cited by:

    1. Justus Bonz, 2021. "Application of a multi-objective multi traveling salesperson problem with time windows," Public Transport, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 35-57, March.
    2. Knut Haase & Mathias Kasper & Matthes Koch & Sven Müller, 2019. "A Pilgrim Scheduling Approach to Increase Safety During the Hajj," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 67(2), pages 376-406, March.
    3. Aniket, Kumar, 2018. "Solow-Swan growth model with global capital markets and congestible public goods," MPRA Paper 87844, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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