Two affiliated TRACE laboratories track and simulate pedestrian behaviour in Lausanne’s train station in order to envision future scenarios of growth in pedestrian traffic and anticipate potential issues related to infrastructures.
As the number of users keeps rising in most cities, it becomes vital to better understand pedestrian dynamics and pedestrian strategies to gain access to and travel within complex multimodal interfaces like train stations. Existing infrastructures must be upgraded to answer the needs of travellers and non-travellers alike, in order to reduce congestion and increase traffic fluidity, while guaranteeing adequate access to facilities located in the immediate vicinity of the transport hubs themselves. In order to guarantee the efficiency of such upgrading in Lausanne’s train station, TRACE affiliated laboratories TRANSP-OR and LTS5, in collaboration with Swiss Federal Railways, have united their skills in the tracking and simulation of pedestrian behaviour so as to envision future scenarios of growth in pedestrian traffic and anticipate potential issues related to infrastructures.
The objectives of this research are threefold: (i) understand pedestrian strategies (route choice, stopovers, etc.) to access and navigate multimodal interfaces through qualitative observation field work, (ii) automatically detect, track and monitor pedestrian traffic through the development of tracking algorithms that extract pedestrian data (counts, trajectories, speeds, densities, etc.), and (iii) modelling and simulation of pedestrian behaviour in order to optimise flows under various scenarios.
This project will last nine months and is led by the Transportation Center, under the supervision of Sonia Lavadinho. It is sponsored by Swiss Federal Railways.
| Principal investigators | Prof. Michel Bierlaire, Michaël Thémans |
|---|---|
| Project manager | Sonia Lavadinho |
| Sponsor | SBB CFF FFS |
| Period | 2011-2012 |
| Laboratories | TRACE, TRANSP-OR, LTS5 |
| Partner | VisioSafe |
| Collaboration | TRACE |