Claudio Feliciani

Claudio Feliciani
The University of Tokyo | Todai · Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology

PhD

About

111
Publications
15,272
Reads
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1,479
Citations
Additional affiliations
December 2010 - September 2014
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Position
  • Engineer
Education
October 2014 - September 2017
The University of Tokyo
Field of study
  • Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies
September 2008 - September 2010
ETH Zurich
Field of study
  • Nuclear Engineering
September 2004 - October 2007
ETH Zurich
Field of study
  • Mechanical Engineering

Publications

Publications (111)
Article
Full-text available
Given the increasing urban population and frenetic mobility, understanding how individuals perceive crowding at large-scale events is crucial for effective crowd management and safety. This study focuses on Tokyo Big Sight in Japan exhibitions to examine participants’ perceptions of peak crowding times, locations, and local density, and compare the...
Article
Full-text available
Human crowds display various self-organized collective behaviours, such as the spontaneous formation of unidirectional lanes in bidirectional pedestrian flows. In addition, parts of pedestrians’ footsteps are known to be spontaneously synchronized in one-dimensional, single-file crowds. However, footstep synchronization in crowds with more freedom...
Article
Full-text available
We recently proposed the "Congestion Number" (CN) as a metricto evaluate the state of a pedestrian crowd. Such metric, whose definition is based on the gradient of the rotor of the crowd velocity field, appears to provide additional information with respect to traditional metrics based on pedestrian density and flow. We also published two works on...
Article
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been a major global event. Countless restrictions and recommendations have revealed novel insights into the everyday lives of people, which are far from uniform across cultures. In this explorative study, the mood perception of people from “individualistic” (Finland) and “collectivistic” (Japan and Sout...
Article
Full-text available
Accurately evaluating pedestrian congestion is crucial for evidence-based improvements in various walking environments. Tracking pedestrian movements in real-world settings often leads to incomplete data collection. Despite this challenge, pedestrian congestion with missing data has not been extensively addressed in existing research. This study ex...
Article
In event management, preventing excessive overcrowding is not only essential for providing comfort but also crucial for ensuring safety. However, understanding the crowd dynamics of participants in outdoor events can be challenging. One of the primary reasons is the limited availability of sensing systems suitable for outdoor use. Challenges includ...
Article
Full-text available
Human crowd behavior is an intriguing example of collective behavior where global dynamics emerge from interindividual interactions. Although most studies of human crowds assume that all individuals are independent, the presence and impact of social groups, such as friends or families, have recently been explored. Spatial structures resulting from...
Article
Urban centers are getting crowded, public transportation is becoming congested, and mass events are attracting an increasing number of people. Crowd disasters are not rare, and to prevent them the careful planning of pedestrian facilities and collaboration among stakeholders in the organization of events are crucial. When communication and coordina...
Article
This study analyzed behavioral changes in South Korean individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic due to movement restrictions and examined their psychological effects. Attributes considered include age and gender, place of residence, and characteristics of the residential environment and communities they came into contact with, which are considered...
Article
Managing crowds is important not only during evacuation in disasters such as earthquakes and fires but also during normal situations. In particular, places where many people gather every day, such as stations or event venues, need such management to prevent crowd accidents. Moreover, efficient guidance that prevents people from waiting or queuing c...
Article
Understanding how visitors respond to crowding is crucial for ensuring the success, safety, and overall enjoyment of large-scale exhibitions. However, despite its significance, limited research has explored this issue. To address this gap, we conducted a questionnaire survey in 2022 and 2023 for visitors to exhibitions held at the Tokyo Big Sight C...
Article
Full-text available
Identifying effective strategies describing crowd dynamics is crucial to enhance simulations of pedestrians for crowded event planning and management. Various modelling solutions have been proposed to describe how people try to exit from a built environment in normal and emergency. Several of these solutions rely on the use of distance maps or floo...
Preprint
Similar to other animal groups, human crowds exhibit a variety of self-organized collective behaviors. Spontaneous formation of unidirectional lanes in bidirectional pedestrian flows is one of the most striking examples of self-organization in human crowds. In addition, previous experimental studies have suggested that stepping among pedestrians is...
Article
Full-text available
For pedestrians in walking facilities, their movements are often obstructed by bottlenecks where the walkable widths are geometrically reduced. In previous research, to reproduce the influence of bottlenecks on pedestrian movements, agent-based simulation models have been widely applied. However, their high reliability on modeling rules and paramet...
Preprint
Full-text available
Pedestrian groups are commonly found in crowds but research on their social aspects is comparatively lacking. To fill that void in literature, we study the dynamics of collision avoidance between pedestrian groups (in particular dyads) and individual pedestrians in an ecological environment, focusing in particular on (i) how such avoidance depends...
Article
Full-text available
Pedestrian groups are commonly found in crowds but research on their social aspects is comparatively lacking. To fill that void in literature, we study the dynamics of collision avoidance between pedestrian groups (in particular dyads) and individual pedestrians in an ecological environment, focusing in particular on (i) how such avoidance depends...
Article
In this work we investigate the behaviour of a human crowd in a cross-flow by analysing the results of a set of controlled experiments in which subjects were divided into two groups, organised in such a way to explore different density settings, and asked to walk through the crossing area. We study the results of the experiment by defining and inve...
Article
In this work, we try to reproduce empirical results concerning the behaviour of a human crowd in a cross-flow using a hierarchy of models, which differ in the details of the body shape (using a disk-shaped body vs a more realistic elliptical shape) and in how collision avoiding is performed (using only information regarding “centre of mass” distanc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Pedestrian groups are commonly found in crowds but research on their social aspects is comparatively lacking. To fill that void in literature, we study the dynamics of collision avoidance between pedestrian groups (in particular dyads) and individual pedestrians in an ecological environment, focusing in particular on (i) how such avoidance depends...
Article
Full-text available
Pedestrians threading through a crowd is a striking example of coordinated actions. Mutual anticipation between pedestrians is a candidate mechanism underlying such coordination. To examine this possibility, we experimentally intervened pairs of pedestrians performing simple avoidance tasks. Pedestrians in the baseline condition spontaneously coord...
Chapter
Collective self-organization is a widely studied topic in animal behavior, but it also attracts the attention of researchers studying crowds of people. The creation and dynamics of self-organized structures in animals have been often studied by means of numerical simulation, also considering how they would change in relation to the surrounding envi...
Chapter
Full-text available
In this research, we introduce a modified TASEP model with a bottleneck in order to model visitors’ behavior in a crowded aquarium, Kaiyukan in Japan, and to propose a congestion reduction method. It is distinct in that visitors walk through a fixed one-way aisle, as opposed to a typical museum or aquarium where visitors can move freely in an open...
Preprint
Human activities are often performed together between two or more persons, as if they are a complex dance. Threading through a crowd is a striking example of such coordinated actions. Behavioral coordination should help to reduce head-on collisions, smooth a pedestrian's pathway through a crowd, and promote a self-organization process. Although mut...
Conference Paper
Aiming to improve traffic safety, we investigated the effect of landscape and soundscape on driving behavior in urban roads using a VR driving simulator. While active and passive systems are implemented in vehicles and safer infrastructure is being proposed and built, previous research has suggested that the environment around roads also affects dr...
Article
The evaluation of pedestrian comfortability is important for the construction and management of walkable spaces. Pedestrian level-of-service (LOS), which is mostly categorized by density, has been widely applied and is believed to be capable of indicating the comfortability of the crowd. However, there is a lack of evidence that physically measured...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this work we investigate the behaviour of a human crowd in a cross-flow. We first analyse the results of a set of controlled experiments in which subjects were divided into two groups, in such a way to explore different density settings, and asked to walk through the crossing area. We study the results of the experiment by analysing, along with...
Article
Due to the inevitability of placing obstacles when designing walking facilities, it is important to understand the influence of the obstacle during pedestrian egress to build a safer and more efficient walking environment. However, previous experimental studies on the influence of the obstacle during egress tend to be controversial: some suggest im...
Article
Full-text available
Human crowds provide paradigmatic examples of collective behavior emerging through self-organization. Understanding their dynamics is crucial to help manage mass events and daily pedestrian transportation. Although recent findings emphasized that pedestrians’ interactions are fundamentally anticipatory in nature, whether and how individual anticipa...
Article
Crowd egress at narrow exit is a popular research topic, as its intrinsic importance in architectural designs and building codes. However, relatively few studies have been conducted to verify the performance of pedestrian models for crowd escape at exits, especially relating to different exit designs. This paper aims to verify the applicability of...
Article
Pedestrian evacuation dynamics under near zero or limited visibility conditions are usually different from normal evacuation conditions. In previous studies, the competitiveness of evacuees under limited visibility condition is mainly controlled by stimulating their physical and psychological states during evacuation, and the monetary incentive eff...
Chapter
Behavior of crowds may change any time and methods to control their motion and ensure safety are required. Crowd control needs a progressive approach in which static solutions simply relying on information provision represent the base on which gradually restrictive measures physically limiting crowd motion are implemented upon necessity. To success...
Chapter
Crowd management must always give the highest priorities to protecting people’s lives. This is the foundation on which everything in the philosophy of preventive safety is built. The management system described in this work can be summarized in the list of “the seven knows” provided in this chapter.
Chapter
Crowd simulation is becoming the dominant way to design infrastructures where large numbers of people transit or move and to plan mass events. Simulation software range from commercial products provided with extensive documentation to open-source codes available for research and development. The commercialization of crowd simulators has allowed to...
Chapter
Analyzing under what circumstances crowd accidents are likely to occur and how they can be avoided is important to ensure safety. The information provided in this chapter can help to prepare for the imminent risks of crowd accidents. These risks can be determined by comparing given circumstances to those that caused crowd accidents driven by extern...
Chapter
Planning an event or preparing for the opening of a new facility is not an easy task and requires months or years of preparation and a continuous discussion between all stakeholders. While crowd sensing and simulation is a technical work, requiring theoretical knowledge and know-how expertise, planning largely rely on experience and accumulated fee...
Chapter
Although it is possible to define crowd’s properties in a quantitative way, measuring these quantities ultimately relies on sensors. Nowadays, there are multiple ways to collect quantitative data from crowds of people. Images from cameras can be analyzed to extract people’s position or related information and additional technologies such as distanc...
Chapter
The definition of “crowd” has been the subject of several disputes, let alone the description of its behavior and properties. Although there is no universal way to classify and describe crowds, there are some qualitative properties that can help profiling a specific crowd and manage it accordingly. In addition, there are also characteristic pattern...
Chapter
A successful crowd management strategy is based on a correct risk assessment. Although a growing number of tools and technologies are available to crowd managers and it is increasingly easier obtaining information on previous events or accessing reports on crowd accidents, risks are sometimes difficult to be quantified without a structured methodol...
Chapter
Crowds of people have been studied for more than a century, but their behavior has not been (and may possibly never be) fully understood. Nonetheless, the presence of crowds of people is becoming a dominant part of our modern civilization, and it is therefore important to find efficient ways to manage them in order to guarantee safety and comfort f...
Article
Full-text available
Improvements in the design of pedestrian facilities have reduced the frequency of crowd accidents, and safety is now generally ensured in well-planned crowd events. However, congestion and inefficient use of infrastructures still remain an issue. To guarantee comfort and reduce close contacts between people, there are circumstances when crowd densi...
Chapter
ManyJia, XiaoluFeliciani, ClaudioYanagisawa, DaichiNishinari, Katsuhiro present studies have illustrated the influence of obstacle on the egress efficiency of the crowd. In this paper, we have explored the influence of obstacle on both the egress efficiency and congestion status of pedestrians in a corridor with fixed width. A series of experiments...
Chapter
ThisFujita, AkihiroFeliciani, ClaudioYanagisawa, DaichiNishinari, Katsuhiro study focuses on the difference in walking speed among pedestrians, whereby experiments were conducted asking participants to walk at different speeds. We examined the various factors that affect a pedestrian’s individual speed and the macroscopic difference between crowds...
Chapter
The study of pedestrian dynamicsPedestrian dynamics has attracted the attention in various research fields because of its potential impact on the design of infrastructures and crowd safety. Recent studies have emphasised that the presence of social groupsSocial group such as families and friends would impact on pedestrian dynamics. However, how soc...
Chapter
RoadFeliciani, ClaudioCrociani, LucaGorrini, AndreaNagahama, AkihitoNishinari, KatsuhiroBandini, Stefania accidents are among the leading cause of death worldwide, with developing countries paying the highest toll. Among the different road users, pedestrians are the most vulnerable. A better understanding of the relation occurring between car drive...
Chapter
RecentFeliciani, ClaudioMurakami, HisashiShimura, KenichiroNishinari, Katsuhiro improvements in crowd sensing and dynamic signageDynamic signage are paving the way for automatic crowd controlCrowd control, in which real-time information is used to steer crowds of people. However, little is known on the impact that automatic information provisionInf...
Article
Full-text available
Although some experimental evidence showed that an obstacle placed in front of a door allows making people's evacuations faster, the efficacy of such a solution has been debated for over 15 years. Researchers are split between those who found the obstacle beneficial and those who could not find a significant difference without it. One of the reason...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we perform an experiment on the interaction of pedestrians in a chaotic environment and investigate the possibility to study its results using a thermodynamic model. In contrast to simple single-file unidirectional scenarios, where only distance and time are relevant to adjust walking speed, bidirectional cases are much more complex...
Preprint
Human crowds provide paradigmatic examples of collective behavior emerging through self-organization. Although the underlying interaction has been considered to obey the distance-dependent law, resembling physical particle systems, recent findings emphasized that pedestrian motions are fundamentally influenced by the anticipated future positions of...
Article
Full-text available
Follow the leader is one of the fundamental behaviors in bicycle traffic that describes the longitudinal interactions between two consecutive bicycles. It plays a predominant role in the development of micro-simulation models, safety evaluation and capacity estimation of bicycle infrastructure. To understand bicycle-following movements, previous st...
Article
This study presents the findings of an evacuation experiment involving a mixed population of able-bodied walking pedestrians and wheelchair users. A simulation model capable of reproducing the results is also introduced. The experiment was designed as a square room having four hidden exits that were different in nature (narrow, wide, sloped, and wi...
Preprint
The concept of (crowd) Congestion Level ($CL$) was introduced in Feliciani et al (Transportation Research, 2018) and presented at the PED 2018 conference by C. Feliciani. Following the PED presentation, along with appreciation for the novel contribution, a few interesting questions were raised, concerning the integral/differential nature of the def...
Article
The floor field cellular automaton model (FFCA) has been widely adopted to simulate pedestrian and evacuation dynamics. Many self-organized phenomena could be reproduced with the FFCA model, such as the lane formation in bidirectional pedestrian flow. However, as presented in this study, when we tried to use the FFCA model to simulate an experiment...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we present two quantities aimed at numerically describing the level of congestion and the intrinsic risk of pedestrian crowds. The congestion level allows to assess the smoothness of pedestrian streams and recognize regions where self-organization is difficult or not possible. This measure differs from previous attempts to quantify c...
Article
Full-text available
Present simulation and experimental research still have deficiency in depicting the evading behaviour of single pedestrians confronting with an obstacle, which is the basis for the study of crowd dynamics affected by obstacles in real life. Therefore, this study will conduct experiments with a bar-shaped obstacle in the middle of a corridor and exp...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we developed a new pedestrian model, where pedestrians are represented with three circles and rotate their body to avoid others. In most pedestrian models, the body posture of pedestrians is statically connected with the walking direction; however, they may become different in our model, in other words, pedestrians can walk sideways....
Article
Full-text available
This study focuses on social pedestrian groups in public spaces and makes an effort to identify the social relation between the group members. We particularly consider dyads having coalitional or mating relation. We derive several observables from individual and group trajectories, which are suggested to be distinctive for these two sorts of relati...
Article
Full-text available
Wall-following is a very important means for pedestrians to navigate during evacuation when visibility is limited. Empirical and experimental results regarding wall-following behaviour are scarce in the literature. How pedestrians approach a wall, how they decide on a wall-following direction, and how they address conflicts are still poorly underst...
Article
Full-text available
This study focuses on social pedestrian groups in public spaces and makes an effort to identify the type of social relation between the group members. As a first step for this identification problem, we focus on dyads (i.e. 2 people groups). Moreover, as a mutually exclusive categorization of social relations, we consider the domain-based approach...
Chapter
Although it is widely recognised that the presence of groups influences microscopic and aggregated pedestrian dynamics, a precise characterisation of the phenomenon still calls for evidences and insights. The present paper describes micro- and macro-level original analyses on data characterising pedestrian behaviour in the presence of counterflows...
Chapter
Unsignalized crosswalks are one of the most critical/risky traffic infrastructures in terms of safety, due to potentially vehicle–pedestrian conflictual interactions. Many accidents occur there and elderly pedestrians are among the most vulnerable victims. In a previous work, a simulation model has been developed with the aim of predicting traffic...
Article
This work presents a simulation model for unsignalized crosswalks which takes into account collisions between vehicles and pedestrians, thus allowing to assess the estimated yearly pedestrian fatality. In particular, we focus on a method to calibrate such a model combining measurable crosswalk characteristics, such as maximum speed limit or drivers...
Article
This study investigates motion in a crowd of pedestrians walking at different speeds. Three pedestrian groups are considered (slow walkers, normal walkers, and fast walkers), and we design the experimental condition by mixing the normal walkers with either the slow or the fast walkers to create flows with different speed compositions. All the walke...
Article
In this paper, controlled experiments have been conducted to make deep analysis on the obstacle evading behavior of individual pedestrians affected by one obstacle. Results of Fourier transform show that with the increase of obstacle width, the frequency and amplitude of body sway would barely be affected while the lateral deviation of walking dire...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this paper, controlled experiments have been conducted to make deep analysis on the obstacle evading behavior of individual pedestrians affected by one obstacle. Results of Fourier Transform show that with the increase of obstacle width, the frequency and amplitude of body sway would barely be affected while the lateral deviation of walking dire...
Article
Full-text available
Similar to other animal groups, human crowds exhibit various collective patterns that emerge from self-organization. Recent studies have emphasized that individuals anticipate their neighbours' motions to seek their paths in dynamical pedestrian flow. This path-seeking behaviour results in deviation of pedestrians from their desired directions (i.e...