Mobility analysis inside buildings using Distrimobs simulator: A case study

Simulators are used in many fields to aid the design process. They are often used in industrial engineering, operations management and operational research to model many systems. Examples include commerce, health, defence, manufacturing, logistics, etc. Pedestrian mobility may be simulated too; thus the design of buildings and urban spaces may be aided by these kinds of simulations. In this paper, we illustrate an analysis made using the Distrimobs pedestrian mobility simulator. The simulation is applied to a historical building with a complex topology servicing many functions from the Headquarters of the University of Bologna to the secretariats. The analysis includes inner mobility flows, some experiments with the magnitude of these fluxes and others with the structure of the building. Finally, it is shown that simulation can be used to study pedestrian mobility inside environments by presenting a virtual experiment of possible improvement to an existing building. This paper shows some examples of the potentialities offered by pedestrian mobility simulation. We conclude that such potentialities should be used in the future during the design process. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.