1,721,747 research outputs found
Microscopic simulation of pedestrians in accessibility evaluation
No full textEvaluation of accessibility is of increasing importance to the design of the public realm – including both the built and moving environments and particularly the interface between them. This is of particular relevance to people who are living on the ‘margins of accessibility’ – for example elderly or disabled people – for whom the possibility of reaching an activity really is dependent on whether they can negotiate an obstacle such as boarding a bus.
This paper discusses the conceptual nature of the problem by considering the interactions between a person, the environment and the activities they wish to pursue. A barrier is seen as the outcome of an interaction between an individual and some element of the environment which results in the person being unable to complete an action which is necessary for success in the chosen activity. The paper proposes a model which incorporates the concept of ‘capabilities’: those required by the environment in order for an action to be completed and those provided by a person who intends to attempt the action in that environment.
The paper then describes how the systematisation of these concepts could be tested by incorporating them in a microscopic simulation model of pedestrian activity. A worked example is used to demonstrate how the conceptual approach could yield consistent results under these circumstances. The paper concludes that the conceptual model provides a good basis for the evaluation of accessibility and that the microscopic simulation model incorporating these characteristics would be a useful way of testing pedestrian-environment interactions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Intelligent vehicles in pedestrian environments
No full textThis paper concerns research aimed at developing an intelligent vehicle able to share the environment and to
interact sympathetically with humans. This would oer new applications for goods and people transportation
not only within outdoor restricted trac areas (parks and cities) but also in indoor environments such as
industrial and service areas (manufacturing, stations, airports). In relation to the eld of intelligent vehicles
and mobile robotics, the motion planning and control problems are well-known research subjects. However
nowadays mobile robots are not able to operate in rapidly changing semi-structured or unstructured crowded
human environments, with robots not used to the presence of many humans and with people not used to the
presence of robots. In relation to pedestrian behaviour most eort in recent research is addressed to understand
how people move around to nd out optimality criteria for space design. The basic idea of the proposed research
is to identify the rules which describe pedestrian behaviour and to transfer them to the intelligent mobile robot
in such a way to make it, rst, able to operate in complex and rapidly changing environments, secondly to do
it as a pedestrian, thus minimising its interactions and potential disturbance to pedestrian ows
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