Crowd digital twins: Motivation, architecture, and roadmap

Crowd management is the problem of dealing with physical crowds of humans, e.g., for safety reasons or to improve services through crowd-awareness. Information and communication technology can be of great help in supporting the monitoring and management of crowds. Following the “digital twin concept”, a group or crowd of people – as a dynamic physical entity – is amenable to be represented and managed through digital models. Accordingly, in this work we present and develop a general notion of a Crowd Digital Twin (CDT), intended as the digital twin associated to physical gatherings of humans. We motivate it as a fundamental component of crowd management systems, and investigate the functional and non-functional requirements that such a technical solution should satisfy. Then, we consider what the fundamental components of CDT systems are, and accordingly delineate a reference architecture aimed at flexibly supporting the corresponding physical-digital thread. We also discuss methods and tools that might be useful for supporting implementations of such a CDT concept, and delineate a set of challenges that may serve as a roadmap for future research on the topic.