Rebecca Maloney
Americas Press Office ,Boston
Public transportation paper using Arup’s MassMotion software is the winner of the Transportation Research Board’s William W. Millar award.
“Using Mass Motion to Analyze Crowd Congestion and Mitigation Measures at Interchange Subway Stations: Case of Bloor-Yonge Station in Toronto, Canada,” authored by Amer Shalaby, Siva Srikukenthiran, and David King, won the William W. Millar Award. This prestigious award from the Transportation Research Board recognises the best public transportation paper of the year.
MassMotion, a powerful and unique 3D modelling program developed by Oasys — the software house of Arup — is an advanced pedestrian simulation and crowd analysis tool. Able to simulate hundreds of thousands of people with realistic behaviours, MassMotion enables engineers to test and optimise their ideas.
In their paper, Shalaby, Srikukenthiran, and King identify a knowledge gap in regards to how crowd congestion is impacted by the arrival patterns of trains at interchange stations. To fill this gap, a model of the station was developed, calibrated, and validated in MassMotion. The authors found that adjusting train arrival patterns could have as much as a 63% reduction in passenger congestion.
The award was presented at the TRB awards ceremony in Washington DC, during the TRB 94th Annual Meeting on 12 January.
Click here to read “Using Mass Motion to Analyze Crowd Congestion and Mitigation Measures at Interchange Subway Stations: Case of Bloor-Yonge Station in Toronto, Canada.”