Giuseppe Inturri

Multi agent simulation of pedestrian behavior in closed spatial environments

Agent-based simulations show their potential in many context of transport management in presence of unusual demand, such as airport passenger terminals, railway stations, urban pedestrian areas, public buildings, street events or open space exhibitions, where management or control by related authorities and public safety are strongly affected by spatial geometry and crowd behavior. We illustrate these ideas with an example based on the simulation of people visiting and evacuating a museum, which offers an excellent test environment for simulating a collective behavior emerging from local movements in a closed space. The model we apply is developed within a programmable modeling environment, NetLogo, designed for simulating time-evolution of complex systems. We verify the existing emergency plan for building evacuation, for different demand patterns such as visiting group size and inter-arrival times, and we compare it with alternative evacuation strategies looking for the optimal one. In this respect, we further demonstrate the effectiveness of agent-based simulations in finding emergent results difficult to be predicted.

Simulating Opinion Dynamics on Stakeholders’ Networks through Agent-based Modeling for Collective Transport Decisions☆

In transport planning several actors with conflicting objectives are involved in the decision-making process. Though public participation is fundamental to legitimate a transport plan, some inconsistencies may arise when individual preferences are aggregated into a collective decision. In this work, we reproduce the process of collective preference ranking among plan alternatives using agent-based simulations of the opinion dynamics on groups of stakeholders linked in typical social networks. The results show the efficacy of interaction and the relevance of the network topology to find a transitive and shared collective preference ranking.

Accessibility and Centrality for Sustainable Mobility: Regional Planning Case Study

Accessibility is a widely discussed theme, approached by several disciplines, such as geography, urban and land-use planning, and transportation. This study assesses the relevance of accessibility for sustainable mobility planning and examines the existing analogies with the concept of centrality—a consolidated issue in social science, geographic and land-use modeling, and, more recently, intensively used in social-network analysis and transport-network analysis. Centrality measures the relative importance of nodes in a network, but it can be evaluated from different perspectives. In fact, different indexes are available to measure different ways for a node to be central. This paper also examines recent innovations in accessibility modeling and suggests improvement by proposing a new accessibility measure. This paper uses both traditional and lesser-known measures to analyze a case study, considering both accessibility and centrality indexes with the aim of investigating their potential correlation, efficacy, and suitability to support an integrated land-use and transport-planning approach.

Finding shared decisions in stakeholder networks: An agent-based approach

We address the problem of a participatory decision-making process where a shared priority list of alternatives has to be obtained while avoiding inconsistent decisions. An agent-based model (ABM) is proposed to mimic this process in different social networks of stakeholders who interact according to an opinion dynamics model. Simulations’ results show the efficacy of interaction in finding a transitive and, above all, shared decision. These findings are in agreement with real participation experiences regarding transport planning decisions and can give useful suggestions on how to plan an effective participation process for sustainable policy-making based on opinion consensus.

VTOL aircraft in emergency planning and management: a model for a helipad network.

The scientific literature regarding HEMS (Helicopter Emergency Medical Service) planning lacks a method for defining optimal sites for helipads that takes into account risk distribution and hospital location. Such a method could minimise overall rescue time in emergency situations. In this paper a method that supports the decisions taken by disaster planners and managers is developed, focusing on the quantification of necessary air resources for the management of some probable calamities. Given a region characterised by a natural and non-natural disaster risk map, along with a comprehensive transport system (also characterised by a risk map), a set of emergency destinations (hospitals), a set of heliports/helipads dislocated on the territory and a number of available HEMS rotorcraft, the aim of the paper is to assess the adequacy of the VTOL/FATO (Vertical Take-Off and Landing/Final Take-Off and Landing Area) system in order to deal with a set of possible emergencies.

The Role of Transport in Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change Impacts in Urban Areas

This paper is part of the Green and Blue Space Adaptation for Urban Areas and Eco-towns (GRaBS) project, funded by the EU with the objective of improving the adaptive capacity of towns and cities to the impacts of climate change. The aim of this contribution is to facilitate the inclusion of climate variables into the decision-making processes within the planning, design and operation of the transport system. The aim is to accomplish this through pursuing win-win solutions which both mitigate the future effects of climate change at the global scale, while strengthening the local adaptive capacity of transport systems to cope with the inevitable impacts of changes in climate. The paper further shares the main objective of the GRaBS project, to promote climate-resilient urban development through green and blue infrastructure, largely through enhancing walking and cycling as the most climate-sustainable modes of transport.

Dealing with the Complexity of Stakeholder Interaction in Participatory Transport Planning

Including an active participation of citizens and stakeholders from the beginning of transport decision-making processes is widely recognized as a precondition to avoid the failure of projects/policies/plans as a consequence of a lack of consensus. Appropriate methods and tools are needed to support participation processes towards well-thought and shared solutions. In this paper quantitative methods, stakeholder interaction and simulation models are used to guide and reproduce a participatory experiment aimed at consensus building about mobility management strategies. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used to elicit stakeholder preferences, different voting methods have been used to aggregate the individual preferences, group interaction has been performed via a facilitated dialogue to reach a consensus among stakeholders and an agent-based model (ABM) has been used to simulate the same consensus building process. Besides the social network of stakeholders has been analyzed to gain insights on its influence on the consensus formation.

Innovative Transport Systems to Promote Sustainable Mobility: Developing the Model Architecture of a Traffic Control and Supervisor System.

In the last decades, a big effort has been made in terms of research, strategies and initiatives to boost new forms of sustainable urban mobility, in order to reduce the externalities associated with the transport sector. While the European Commission emphasizes integrated planning at all mobility levels, on the other hand it recognizes that is equally important to make technologically modern mobility system, in order to maximize its efficiency. With regard to this technological modernization, the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are considered as a tool, that to date more than any other, it allows us to manage a “smart” mobility.

COMPARISON BETWEEN BUS RAPID TRANSIT AND LIGHT-RAIL TRANSIT SYSTEMS: A MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION ANALYSIS APPROACH

The construction choice between two different transport systems in urban areas, as in the case of Light-Rail Transit (LRT) and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) solutions, is often performed on the basis of cost-benefit analysis and geometrical constraints due to the available space for the infrastructure. Classical economic analysis techniques are often unable to take into account some of the non-monetary parameters which have a huge impact on the final result of the choice, since they often include social acceptance and sustainability aspects. The application of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques can aid decision makers in the selection process, with the possibility to compare non-homogeneous criteria, both qualitative and quantitative, and allowing the generation of an objective ranking of the different alternatives. The coupling of MCDA and Geographic Information System (GIS) environments also permits an easier and faster analysis of spatial parameters, and a clearer representation of indicator comparisons. Based on these assumptions, a LRT and BRT system will be analysed according to their own transportation, economic, social and environmental impacts as a hypothetical exercise; moreover, through the use of MCDA techniques a global score for both systems will be determined, in order to allow for a fully comprehensive comparison.