Smart crowds in smart cities: real life, city scale deployments of a smartphone based participatory crowd management platform

We describe a platform for smart, city-wide crowd management based on participatory mobile phone sensing and location/situation specific information delivery. The platform supports quick and flexible deployments of end-to-end applications for specific events or spaces that include four key functionalities: (1) Mobile phone based delivery of event/space specific information to the users, (2) participatory sensor data collection (from app users) and flexible analysis, (3) location and situation specific message multicast instructing people in different areas to act differently in case of an emergency and (4) post mortem event analysis. This paper describes the requirements that were derived through a series of test deployments, the system architecture, the implementation and the experiences made during real life, large scale deployments. Thus, until today it has been deployed at 14 events in three European countries (UK, Netherlands, Switzerland) and was used by well over 100,000 people.