Evaluating users’ benefits from a crowd management system in a smart city project

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies are deployed in smart cities to enhance efficiency, convenience and safety. However, the benefits are usually intangible since the services do not carry a market price. This paper presents a research on a crowd management system as a smart city project using the Contingent Valuation (CV) method to estimate the users’ benefits. A marathon which took place in Hong Kong was adopted as a pilot study to analyze the application of CV in a major event during which video analytic equipment was deployed to feed real time data into an information dissemination system for dissipating crowd efficiently from the venue. The Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) is derived from an on-the-spot survey with the non-parametric method, which is reflective of the non-market benefits as perceived by users of the CM system.