Crowd Digital Twins: High-Level Requirements and Architecture

Crowd management is the problem of dealing with physical crowds of humans, e.g., for safety reasons or to improve services through crowd-awareness. In previous work, the notion of a Crowd Digital Twin (CDT), namely the digital twin associated to physical gatherings of humans, was motivated and proposed as a fundamental component of crowd management systems. In this work, we better characterise the CDT notion, by investigating the functional and non-functional requirements that such a technical solution should satisfy. Then, we consider what are the fundamental components of CDT systems, and accordingly delineate a general architecture aimed at flexibly supporting the corresponding physical-digital thread.