Recent research from a Catalan university shows that the flow of pedestrians in cities can be optimised in much the same way as road traffic.
If you live in a busy city like London, getting from A to B as quickly as possible can become something of an obsession. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to help. For drivers or cyclists, traffic-aware navigation is your best bet, and if you rely on public transit, you can use a smartphone-based journey planner. But what about those city-dwellers who prefer to ‘take shanks’ pony’ – or, as they are better known to most, pedestrians?
There may well be a solution for them too, and to learn more about it, HERE360 spoke to Dr. Manlio De Domenico from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). Working with colleagues at URV (Prof. Alex Arenas), MIT (Prof. Marta Gonzalez) and the University of Birmingham (Antonio Lima, PhD candidate), he published a paper in a recent issue of EPJ Data Science that looked specifically at optimising foot traffic in Milan, Italy. “In the paper, we developed a routing system that leverages multiple data sources coming from the city,” said Manlio, “This allows us to provide personalised routing options that balance personal preferences of the individual with common interests of the multitudes.”
Read the full article on HERE360 website.
