A Feedback Control-Based Crowd Dynamics Management in IoT System

The development of technologies related to the Internet of Things (IoT) provides a new perspective on applications pertaining to smart cities. Smart city applications focus on resolving issues facing people in everyday life, and have attracted a considerable amount of research interest. The typical issue encountered in such places of daily use, such as stations, shopping malls, and stadiums is crowd dynamics management. Therefore, we focus on crowd dynamics management to resolve the problem of congestion using IoT technologies. Real-time crowd dynamics management can be achieved by gathering information relating to congestion and propose less crowded places. Although many crowd dynamics management applications have been proposed in various scenarios and many models have been devised to this end, a general model for evaluating the control effectiveness of crowd dynamics management has not yet been developed in IoT research. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a model to evaluate the performance of crowd dynamics management applications. In other words, the objective of this paper is to present the proof-of-concept of control effectiveness of crowd dynamics management. Our model uses feedback control theory, and enables an integrated evaluation of the control effectiveness of crowd dynamics management methods under various scenarios. We also provide extensive numerical results to verify the effectiveness of the model.