Introduction to Crowd Management

This book will guide you in a simple and illustrative way through all aspects related to crowd behaviour, including sociological theories, methods of crowd control, people detection and tracking, and crowd simulation and prediction, while examining previous accidents to learn from the past. Crowds are a constant presence in most cities around the globe and mass gatherings are attracting an increasing number of people. While experience can help manage large crowds and plan mass events, knowledge on crowd behaviour is fundamental for successfully dealing with unexpected situations, improving current practices and implementing state-of-the-art technologies in management strategies.

After letting people laugh about the controversy on colliding pedestrians, with this book, two of the Ig Nobel laureates on pedestrian traffic will make you think (and learn) presenting through a collaborative approach, combining theoretical with practical advice, the science behind crowd dynamics and the importance it plays in our increasingly urbanized society. Fundamental aspects related to crowd management are presented using simple concepts requiring little or no knowledge of mathematics or engineering.

Professionals involved in pedestrian traffic, as well as students and researchers entering the field of crowd dynamics, will find this book a useful interdisciplinary introduction on the subject, exploring both fundamental background information and more specific topics related to crowd management.

Claudio Feliciani gained his Ph.D. from the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2017. He is currently Project Associate Professor at the same institution. Although having a background in engineering, he has always had a profound interest on social sciences. As a consequence, his research path has naturally drawn him to pedestrian traffic and crowd management, a crossroad between engineering and social sciences. In this context, he made use of his knowledge on physics and mathematics to create methods to assess crowd condition and develop models for simulation. He has published several journal articles and conference papers, and has one patent registered in his name. In 2021, he had been co-awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in kinetics for a research on the disruption caused by pedestrians distracted by mobile phone use. Beside academic research he has also been active as a volunteer firefighter for several years.

Katsuhiro Nishinari received his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from The University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1995. He is currently a professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include Jamology, which is an interdisciplinary research on transportation, and jamming phenomena include vehicular traffic, pedestrian motion, queueing networks and supply chain by means of applied mathematics, fluid dynamics and statistical physics. He organizes a number of international conferences including ACRI, C&CA and TGF. He has published more than a hundred research papers in leading international journals and several books concerning traffic jams and applied mathematics. In addition, he has been engaged as an advisor of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics Games.