Overcrowding detection in indoor events using scalable technologies

The increase in the number of large-scale events held indoors (i.e., conferences and business events) opens new opportunities for crowd monitoring and access controlling as a way to prevent risks and provide further information about the event’s development. In addition, the availability of already connectable devices among attendees allows to perform non-intrusive positioning during the event, without the need of specific tracking devices. We present an algorithm for overcrowding detection based on passive Wi-Fi requests capture and a platform for event monitoring that integrates this algorithm. The platform offers access control management, attendees monitoring and the analysis and visualization of the captured information, using a scalable software architecture. In this paper, we evaluate the algorithm in two ways: First, we test its accuracy with data captured in a real event, and then we analyze the scalability of the code in a multi-core Apache Spark-based environment. The experiments show that the algorithm provides accurate results with the captured data, and that the code scales properly