Designing visitor journey for optimized visitor throughput: a case study of Rawdah al shareefah

In this paper, we propose an innovative visitor journey to optimize visitor throughput at Rawdah Al Shareefah, a sacred site within the Masjid e Nabavi in Medina, which holds immense significance for Muslims globally. Given the challenge of accommodating a limited number of visitors (750 at a time) against high demand, we propose a visitor journey based on partitioning Rawdah Al Shareefah into smaller blocks. Simulation-based framework is used to generate visitors’ data for an arbitrary visitor journey for subsequent analysis and comparison of competing visitor journeys. Our methodology involves strategically dividing the sacred space into smaller partitions, each hosting an independent subset of visitors. This partitioning allows for a more streamlined flow of visitors. Our experiments reveal a 15% reduction in time with our proposed visitor journey compared to the original visitor journey. Based on these results, our proposed visitor journey has been successfully implemented for visitor management at the site.