Regional development & urban planning

Modifications in the infrastructure or the operational processes of complex traffic systems and hubs like train stations or airports often lead to expected and unexpected changes in travel behaviour. To assess these changes and to evaluate changes in distances, travel times, transfer times etc. a multi-agent-simulation has been developed.

On the basis of current surveys, time-tables and reports a multi-agent-system consist different categories of agents. Each traveller is represented as a single agent and the real world is represented through a virtual world with resources and the agents. During the simulation the whole system is updated every second. Agents will update their attributes and communicate with each other and are able to read attributes from other agents or the world. Each agent has it’s own behaviour. Agents with similar behaviour are grouped but behaviour is randomly assigned with different standard deviations (derived from literature).

Complex situations as for example the SBB station Berne or Lucerne are simulated for the peak hour with more than 40’000 travellers. Also evacuation scenarios for an accident case of a TGV in a tunnel are simulated, including data of temperature and smoke (CO). Agents react on these environmental data with for example reducing speed, or changing direction, searching new destination or decease.

The swiss national exhibition took place in the year 2002 from may to october. Especially the cities of Biel, Neuenburg, Yverdon and Murten with their exhibition places and installations had to deal with peaks of about 180’00 vistors per day. In total more than 10.5 million visitors took the chance to visit the exhibition sites.

Emch+Berger did the overall transport concept and used state of the art modelling and simulation tools to estimate the traffic impacts of the calculated daily transport demand. The results were used to plan measures and optimize traffic during the exhibition time and to develop an effective transport management. The measures were developed with respect to increase the public transport share and avoid motorized individual trips. As a result the modal split of the EXPO.02 visitors was 65%;30% (public transport; motorized individual travel).

The amount of travellers using trains is still increasing. Larger train stations become more and more shopping center with railroad access. It is to be expected, that these developments will lead to bottlenecks within the existing infarstructure. To support the planning and decision process concerning the design and realization of measures simulation, especially micro simulations of pedestrians, are appropriate tools to analyse the impacts of planned measures.

To analyse different development scenarios for the SBB main station Lucerne a agent based micro simulation of the entire station was developed based on an existing pedestrian simulation. Using existing data of travellers, new collected data of pedestrian amounts at all entrance and exists of the station and the timetable a complete origin destination matrix was developed. On this basis 16'000 agents were simulated during the time period 4:20pm - 6:40pm.

As results e.g. travel times, densities (LoS) and loads of elements as e.g. stages and escalators were calculated. Bottlenecks were identified as well as obstacles. Recommendations for measures were made and the impacts of these measures analysed.

Security of tunnels is a recent topic in planning. Because of the high costs of increasing security in existing tunnels or to build new tunnels, simulations of individual movement are appropriate tools to analyse the infrastructural design and planned measures of e.g. security stations. Incidences like fire or explosion could be simulated without the need for large experiments.

For a situation with a fire at the machine of a TGV situated in a tunnel an evacuation simulation was developed. Agents, as representatives for travellers, are modelled with rich behaviour concerning the movement, the recognition of signs and temperature, reactions to smoke in the environment and communication concerning sharing their experiences. Variants of different infrastructual layouts of tracks, security galleries, security areas and doors were studied using the simulation of about 750 passengers leaving the train, searching their way to a parallel secure gallery.

The results, as e.g. travel times, evacuation times, densities and amount of dead passengers are used within the whole decision process about the planned tunnel and it's elements.