Open Access

ARTICLE

Toward Optimal Periodic Crowd Tracking via Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Khalil Chebil^1,2, Skander Htiouech³, Mahdi Khemakhem^1,2,4,*

1 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Engineering and Sciences, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, AlKharj, 11942, Saudi Arabia
2 Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit, Faculty of Sciences of Sfax, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia
3 Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, College of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
4 Department of Mathematics and Business Intelligence, College of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering of Sfax, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

* Corresponding Author: Mahdi Khemakhem. Email:

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2023, 137(1), 233-263. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2023.026476

Received 10 September 2022; Accepted 22 December 2022; Issue published 23 April 2023

Abstract

Crowd management and analysis (CMA) systems have gained a lot of interest in the vulgarization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) use. Crowd tracking using UAVs is among the most important services provided by a CMA. In this paper, we studied the periodic crowd-tracking (PCT) problem. It consists in using UAVs to follow-up crowds, during the life-cycle of an open crowded area (OCA). Two criteria were considered for this purpose. The first is related to the CMA initial investment, while the second is to guarantee the quality of service (QoS). The existing works focus on very specified assumptions that are highly committed to CMAs applications context. This study outlined a new binary linear programming (BLP) model to optimally solve the PCT motivated by a real-world application study taking into consideration the high level of abstraction. To closely approach different real-world contexts, we carefully defined and investigated a set of parameters related to the OCA characteristics, behaviors, and the CMA initial infrastructure investment (e.g., UAVs, charging stations (CSs)). In order to periodically update the UAVs/crowds and UAVs/CSs assignments, the proposed BLP was integrated into a linear algorithm called PCTs solver. Our main objective was to study the PCT problem from both theoretical and numerical viewpoints. To prove the PCTs solver effectiveness, we generated a diversified set of PCTs instances with different scenarios for simulation purposes. The empirical results analysis enabled us to validate the BLP model and the PCTs solver, and to point out a set of new challenges for future research directions.

---

Keywords

---