Understanding human movement patterns

The Ph.D.-project seeks to understand human movement patterns in cities, which is an important factor when planning for greener and smarter cities. The goal is to develop advanced GIS based methods to register, analyze and visualize data on pedestrian and cyclists movement patterns in the cityscape. 

In the first phase the work will be concentrated about collecting data by the use of video, IR or other technologies. The purpose is to simultaneously track individuals moving in crowded cityscapes. Following this the plan is to try and extract parameters for the individual movement patterns by the use of GIS for spatial analysis and statistics. The idea is eventually to be able to develop and improve agent based models of pedestrians and cyclists so their movement in a planned cityscape can be simulated and the design of it fitted to their needs even before the construction is started. 

Project period: October 2012 - October 2015
Researcher: Søren Zebitz Nielsen, Ph.d fellow
Supervisors: Hans Skov-Petersen og Lasse Møller-Jensen.
Research institution: Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management 

For further information, please contact: Søren Zebitz Nielsen, szn@ign.ku.dk