Drones, cameras, artificial intelligence and thermal images. This year the Saudi organization has blurred the best of technology to manage the beyond one million and 400 thousand Muslims who are gathering in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for The great annual pilgrimage of the HAJJ. The heat this week will exceed 40 degrees and also for this reason the measures will be extraordinary. Riad in all mobilized 40 government agencies and 250 thousand officials to reduce the risks related to high temperatures, with 50,000 square meters of covered passages and 400 points of distribution of fresh water.
The Hajj, which lasts from five to six days, takes place mainly outdoors and is one of the five pillars of Islam To which every Muslim who has the possibility must be lent himself at least once in his life. Working day and night in front of maps, screens and apparently infinite data, the Saudi officials have exploited artificial intelligence to help manage the sea of millions of faithful. The technology has proven to be fundamental to trace the enormous amount of videos from over 15,000 cameras inside and around the Holy City of Mecca.
Avoid disasters, manage flows
Systems are tuned to identify anomalous movements of the crowd or predict bottlenecks in pedestrian traffic. The software is also used to help drive over 20,000 buses lined up to transport pilgrims among sacred places. “In our traffic control room, we use specialized cameras equipped with artificial intelligence levels to analyze movements, crowded areas and predict behavior”, he explained Mohamed Nazier, adding that the monitoring will be 24 hours a day. About a dozen staff members sit in line in front of the computers, enlarged the movements of the crowd around the sacred places. On the nearby hills, cameras that resemble small white robots films buildings, roads and paths along the Hajj route, which winds over 20 kilometers between Mecca and Mount Arafat.
Ten years have passed since the Hajj suffered its worst disaster, a crowd that killed up to 2,300 people during the “lapidation of the devil’s ritual”. Hundreds of people also died in other overwhelming ballets of 2006, 1998 and 1994. In 1990, 1,426 pilgrims were trampled on death or asphyxiated when a tunnel ventilation system He failed. “The control room is our eye on the territory,” he said Mohammed al-centurywho supervises the Hajj and the pilgrimage of the UMRAH which lasts all year at the transport center. Artificial intelligence helps to determine “the flow on the roads for holy places and detects emergency situations before they even occur,” he said. The cameras and artificial intelligence can estimate even if a site has reached the maximum capacity, allowing the authorities to deflect the flow of pilgrims, said Qameri.
During the sacred month of Ramadan this year, the system identified when the large mosque had reached full capacity. “The flow towards Haram was therefore interrupted and the controlled process,” he said. The use of advanced technologies extends beyond logistics, also including monitoring of unregistered pilgrims, due to most of the 1,301 deaths in suffocating conditions of last year.
With temperatures that reached 51.8 degrees Celsius last year, the unauthorized faithful who do not have access to curtains and buses with air conditioning have paid the highest price. To try to prevent anyone from sneaking this year, a fleet of drones with cameras is monitoring the entrances of Mecca. “We use artificial intelligence and other tools such as drones and thermal images cameras,” the general manager of Public Security told journalists, the lieutenant general Mohammed bin Abdullah al-Bassami. In the meantime, the Saudi special forces for road safety have said to use “intelligent thermal images” to monitor the perimeter of Mecca and sacred places.