A Queue Management Approach for Social Distancing and Contact Tracing

Abstract

Social distancing is necessary to prevent the rapid spread of a highly contagious disease, such as COVID-19, at least until a vaccine is found and mass-produced. By reducing the probability of an uninfected person coming close or in physical contact with an infected one, the disease transmission in the community can be suppressed. Although social distancing is simple to comprehend, it is not always easy to implement, mainly because not all public spaces are designed with this requirement in mind. In this paper, we present a queue management tool that can be used to allow people that wait for a service practice social distancing. In our approach, people are asked to join a virtual queue, in order to avoid crowds in physical waiting rooms or long waiting queues. Machine learning is used to predict the estimated waiting time of queuers, so they are called just in time to get served. We use past data and machine learning to predict how busy a location will be so that customers can pick the best time to visit the service. Finally, we present the method we use to monitor people taking a service at any time and implement contact tracing in a privacy-preserving manner.

A Survey on Machine Learning and Internet of Medical Things-Based Approaches for Handling COVID-19: Meta-Analysis

“…ML is also used as a tool for managing virtual queues to prevent crowds in physical waiting rooms or long queues. In addition, it is used to predict waiting times and implement calls in a privacy manner in conjunction with the cell phone platform ( 83 ).…”

ViDMASK dataset for face mask detection with social distance measurement

“…P-dispersion problem was proposed in [31] that can solve the minimum number of persons in a place problem, however it covers only one entity of the social distancing that’s number of persons in an area. A virtual queue was implemented to thwart crowd gathering at queues thereby maintaining social distance using machine learning model [32] . Mask RCNN was used to detect people in frame and then frame parameters were used to detect the social distance between them [33] .…”

Machine Learning and Internet of Medical Things for Handling COVID-19: Meta-Analysis

“…ML is also used as a tool for management of virtual queues to prevent crowds in physical waiting rooms or long queues. It is used to predict waiting times and implement calls in a privacy manner in conjunction with the cell-phone platform [72].…”