Pedestrian Infrastructure: Design Optimization and Performance

Nowadays, due to the rapid development of cities, pedestrian dynamics are increasing their importance. In order to improve the quality of life of the citizens in the developing big cities, studying the best solution for a more efficient transport terminals and infrastructural nodes is essential to let people move rapidly from one point of the city to another. So, the study of the pedestrian dynamics and the design of usability spaces achieves a significant role. Terminals are always very busy and, due to the fact that they are usually very crowded, therefore building layout and functional elements need to be designed in the best way, taking into account the structural and legislative constrains and, at the same time, the need of satisfaction of the travel speed desired by users. Moreover, with an accurate design, is it possible to improve the users’ benefits and the usability of the transport terminals. With this consideration, a correct optimization seems to be fundamental in order to achieve better results [1]. The presented methodology to size functional terminal layouts focuses on the integration of analytical and simulative models to minimize the cost function which consists in infrastructure and pedestrian costs. The methodology is applied in the case study of an underground station sector in a metropolis in east Europe: SOBOL methodology is used to generate the population for the genetic algorithm (M.O.G.A. – Multi Objective Genetic Algorithm) application in order to obtain the mathematical optimization of the cost function; while the simulation is implemented to post-evaluate the results. The developed methodology permits to optimize the infrastructure design, guaranteeing the best usability for the users and the minimization of costs.