A Service-Oriented Architecture for Optimal Service Selection and Positioning in Extremely Large Crowds

The problem of managing large crowds has many aspects and has been reported in the literature. One of these aspects is the distribution of supplies such as food and water in especially when the targeted region is overcrowded. Some of the challenges is to plan the locations of food and water supply centres in such a way to achieve multiple objective functions such as the type of food and the shortest distance to customer. A practical example of this problem is the food distribution and food cart location in the region of Mena (also known as Tent City, in Saudi Arabia) during the yearly pilgrimage season. In this work, we propose a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for positioning services in the region of Mena (Mecca - Saudi Arabia) that covers an area of approximately 20 square kilometres during the pilgrimage season. The architecture proposes an optimal service selection as well as a mobile food cart positioning algorithm based on client pre-set profiles to achieve multiple objective functions for the clients as well as the service providers. Some of these objective functions are the least waiting time to be served, the shortest distance to service, the lowest cost, and the maximum profit for the service provider.