Browsing by Author "Feliciani C"

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    A roadmap for the future of crowd safety research and practice: Introducing the Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety and the imperative of a Vision Zero target
    (Elsevier B.V., 2023-08-29) Haghani M; Coughlan M; Crabb B; Dierickx A; Feliciani C; van Gelder R; Geoerg P; Hocaoglu N; Laws S; Lovreglio R; Miles Z; Nicolas A; O'Toole WJ; Schaap S; Semmens T; Shahhoseini Z; Spaaij R; Tatrai A; Webster J; Wilson A
    Crowds can be subject to intrinsic and extrinsic sources of risk, and previous records have shown that, in the absence of adequate safety measures, these sources of risk can jeopardise human lives. To mitigate these risks, we propose that implementation of multiple layers of safety measures for crowds—what we label The Swiss Cheese Model of Crowd Safety—should become the norm for crowd safety practice. Such system incorporates a multitude of safety protection layers including regulations and policymaking, planning and risk assessment, operational control, community preparedness, and incident response. The underlying premise of such model is that when one (or multiple) layer(s) of safety protection fail(s), the other layer(s) can still prevent an accident. In practice, such model requires a more effective implementation of technology, which can enable provision of real-time data, improved communication and coordination, and efficient incident response. Moreover, implementation of this model necessitates more attention to the overlooked role of public education, awareness raising, and promoting crowd safety culture at broad community levels, as one of last lines of defence against catastrophic outcomes for crowds. Widespread safety culture and awareness has the potential to empower individuals with the knowledge and skills that can prevent such outcomes or mitigate their impacts, when all other (exogenous) layers of protection (such as planning and operational control) fail. This requires safety campaigns and development of widespread educational programs. We conclude that, there is no panacea solution to the crowd safety problem, but a holistic multi-layered safety system that utilises active participation of all potential stakeholders can significantly reduce the likelihood of disastrous accidents. At a global level, we need to target a Vision Zero of Crowd Safety, i.e., set a global initiative of bringing deaths and severe injuries in crowded spaces to zero by a set year.
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    What do we head for while exiting a room? a novel parametric distance map for pedestrian dynamic simulations
    (Elsevier B.V., 2023-09-21) Parisi F; Feliciani C; Lovreglio R
    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 floor fields to account for the positions of existing goals and the location of obstacles to avoid. To date, distance maps are assumed to be static (they do not vary over time) and that pedestrians aim at the actual central coordinate of a door. In this work, we challenge the static goal assumption by proposing a novel parametric distance map which is variable depending on the polar coordinates defining the position of a pedestrian having the centre of an exit as the origin (i.e., the distance of the pedestrian and an angle between its direction and the perpendicular to the exit). In this work, we investigate what pedestrians head for while trying to reach an exit. Different parametric solutions are proposed and calibrated using likelihood-based optimisation methods with over 9000 trajectories of individual pedestrians who navigated through an indoor university atrium building to reach several exits. The results highlight good performance for this modelling approach: pedestrians head for targets in front of an exit when they are away from it, and their targets shift behind the exit as they get closer to it, (i.e., distance impact) while their angle does not have impact on this process. The proposed dynamic goal-based distance map can be applied for future pedestrian simulations for crowded event planning and management.