Research pick: Walkability of the urban environment - "An agent-based model to explore urban policies, pedestrian behaviour and walkability"

Researchers from Greece and France have worked together to use an agent-based methodology to research pedestrian behaviour and to help them develop a decision support system for urban planners hoping to improve “walkability” of the built environment. Writing in the International Journal of Decision Support Systems, Georgios Tsaples of the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki and Giovanna Fancello of the Université Paris Dauphine, explain how pedestrian accessibility in our cities is one of the most important aspects of developing urban public policies.

In recent years, pedestrian accessibility has received attention from research fields as diverse as medicine, social and environmental sciences, engineering, healthcare, and the arts and humanities. To be effective, such research has to consider more than transport, the distances involved, services, and activities, but must also take a dynamic view of how people interact with the environment, each other, and traffic within the city. However, as the team points out, “rarely [are] dynamic methods used with the aim of analysing and estimating the processes that influence the behaviour of individuals in space and in time.” They add that this is something a multi-agent model can do.

The team has now used a computational technique known as agent-based modelling to simulate an urban environment and the movement of people within it and the various modes of transport available to them. Their approach encodes the people, the “agents”, and their interactions in simple rules, which then allows the team to predict the outcomes of those interactions.

Ultimately, the models revealed by studying different scenarios, that improving the urban environment people is conducive to people walking more and parts of the environment become favourite places for walking. Moreover, walking behaviour has a positive effect on the individuals and even the economic activity of the city, the team found. The next step will be to assimilate real behaviour in different environments and to improve the models still further to make more definitive predictions about urban human behaviour and guide policymakers and town planners with greater precision.

Tsaples, G. and Fancello, G. (2018) ‘An agent-based model to explore urban policies, pedestrian behaviour and walkability’, Int. J. Decision Support Systems, Vol. 3, Nos. 1/2, pp.4–18.