Saturday, August 22, 2009

Mobility (B09)

Part of Venice's uniqueness derives from its being completely devoid of cars. Moving around in Venice means either walking or taking a boat. Every student going to Venice will get a boat pass (called imob) for the public transportation boats (ACTV), but once they get to Venice the will also discover that walking is often faster than taking a vaporetto or a motoscafo. Crossing the numerous bridges in Venice can be a problem for anyone with some kind of mobility impairment, which may include young mothers with a stroller, or tourists with large suitcases, as well as elderly people using a cane or a walker. WPI has developed the methodology still used today in Venice to collect boat traffic data, so this project team will summarize what we've done so far in the realm of boat traffic, with particular attention on its negative impacts, like moto ondoso and noise, water and air pollution, but will also explore pedestrian traffic as well, where we have not done much thus far.
This project will investigate pedestrian mobility as well as boat traffic and integrate them into a sustainable framework for the modeling of all mobility in Venice, using advanced autonomous agent models , with primary applications in the management of public space, event planning and emergency response. The team will incorporate its findings into the existing Venice Simtable system with assistance from Redfish, the Santa Fe Complex and VPC staff.
The team will touch upon all of these areas in terms of literature review, and will pursue as many of these lines as possible, upon consultation with the advisors. The team will plan the pursuit of the remaining research ideas for future student teams.

1 comment:

Kyle Miller said...

With San Filippo e Giacomo, I would imagine you now have a framework in place for modeling pedestrian traffic. I would love to see a project that develops highly accurate behavior models for the different kinds of pedestrians in Venice, counts the relative numbers of each kind of pedestrian in each kind of neighborhood, and then attempts to model the entire city based on these results. "The Tourist Maze" says it takes about 100,000 tourists to bring Venice to a standstill. Is this actually true? Something I was wondering about - were Venice ever to be the target of a terrorist attack, is there any way the city (or a sestiere, even) could be evacuated? I would think not. Also, boats are neat, and I'm sure there's more that can be done to improve those models, too.