Service Facilities and Guideway Planning in Open Spaces Under Congestion and Disruption Risks

交通服务设施的位置(如机场的安检门、商场附近的中转站)和导轨的布局(如隧道、大门和障碍物)会影响行人交通，而糟糕的设计可能会导致邻近空间和周围毗邻空间的拥堵。不解决与拥堵有关的问题会导致这些设施的效率下降，并通过过度拥挤造成不必要的延误和安全隐患，对公众产生负面影响。糟糕的设计导致拥堵的一个极端表现是拥挤空间中毁灭性的行人踩踏事件。如果一些已建成的设施不时无法投入服务，挤迫情况会进一步恶化。这项研究将为规划高效可靠的服务设施选址和导轨布局创造新的方法，同时考虑行人交通对系统设计的响应。它将提供关键的见解和战略，将支持设计的改进，并最终为运输、货运和制造业带来显著的经济和社会效益。该项目还将通过编写和整合教育材料以及与运输行业和公立学校开展各种外联活动，产生新的教育做法。虽然众所周知，许多服务系统很容易受到拥堵和中断的影响，但对开放空间造成的问题的研究相当有限。该项目将开发描述客户交通流量的方法，并使用两个相辅相成的建模方案克服与设施和轨道设计相关的挑战：一个基于连续/平面建模技术，另一个基于离散模型公式，以解决一些紧迫的挑战，包括(I)按点进行的服务设施位置设计，(Ii)综合导轨部署，以及(Iii)在各种工程背景下的概率服务中断。该框架将能够以解析封闭形式或紧凑大小(即，系统大小的低阶多项式)表达式，精确地或作为高保真近似来量化系统性能。这一方案提供了机会，将一系列传统上难以解决的问题转化为可解决的模型。

Location of transportation service facilities (such as security gates at airports, transit stations near shopping malls) and layout of guideways (such as tunnels, gates and barriers) affect pedestrian traffic and poor design may induce congestion in both the immediate and surrounding contiguous spaces. Failure to address congestion-related issues leads to deterioration in the efficiency of those facilities, and negatively impacts the general public, through unnecessary delay and safety hazards due to overcrowding. An extreme manifestation of poor design leading to congestion is devastating pedestrian stampede incidents in crowded spaces. The overcrowding situation is further worsened if some of the built facilities become unavailable for service from time to time. This research will create new methodology for planning efficient and reliable service facility location and guideway layout, while considering how pedestrian traffic will respond to the system design. It will provide key insights and strategies that will underpin improvement in design and ultimately result in significant economical and societal benefits for transportation, freight and manufacturing industries. This project will also lead to new educational practices by the creation and integration of education materials and a variety of outreach activities with transportation industries and public schools. While it is well-known that many service systems are vulnerable to congestion and disruptions, studies on problems posed in open spaces are quite limited. This project will develop methodology to describe customer traffic fluxes, and overcome challenges associated with facility and guideway design using two complementing modeling schemes: one based on continuous/planar modeling techniques, and the other based on discrete model formulations to address a number of pressing challenges, including (i) point-wise service facility location design, (ii) integrated guideway deployment, and (iii) probabilistic service disruptions, in a variety of engineering contexts. The framework will enable quantification of the system performance either in analytical closed forms or in compact-sized (i.e., of low-order polynomial to the system size) expressions, either exactly or as high-fidelity approximations. This scheme opens up opportunities to transform a set of traditionally hard problems into solvable models.