Katsuhiro Nishinari

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.

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.

The first part of the book provides a pedagogical introduction to the physics of complex systems driven far from equilibrium. In this part we discuss the basic concepts and theoretical techniques which are commonly used to study classical stochastic transport in systems of interacting driven particles. The analytical techniques include mean-field theories, matrix product ansatz, renormalization group, etc. and the numerical methods are mostly based on computer simulations. In the second part of the book these concepts and techniques are applied not only to vehicular traffic but also to transport and traffic-like phenomena in living systems ranging from collective movements of social insects (for example, ants) on trails to intracellular molecular motor transport. These demonstrate the conceptual unity of the fundamental principles underlying the apparent diversity of the systems and the utility of the theoretical toolbox of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in interdisciplinary research far beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of physics.