دانلود رایگان مقاله مشارکت ذینفع مدلسازی در برنامه ریزی حمل و نقل

ABSTRACT

Public Participation in transport planning is often regarded as a formal compulsory phase of the decisionmaking process and it lacks in its real purpose, i.e. engaging people to find the most shared solution in the shortest time, in order to make the process effective and (cost) efficient. The need to include the public in transport planning and decision-making leads to the effort to understand how to design and speed up the process of taking a public decision and to find out if the communication among stakeholders can influence the process of governance. In this paper an agent-based model is presented as a contribution to build new tools to support decision-makers and practitioners in designing and guiding effective participation processes. The model reproduces the interaction process in a network of stakeholders by means of a multi-state opinion dynamics and bounded confidence model as a basis to investigate the consensus formation phenomenon. The participatory decision-making process about the acceptability of a parking management strategy inside a University campus in Catania (Italy) was simulated to see to what extent interaction among stakeholders can foster the emergence of consensus. A better parking managementis one of the priorities for sustainable mobility proposed by the mobility management office of the University. Results show that many links can help the opinion exchange process and the convergence of opinions and that the final outcome (i.e. approval or disapproval of the parking management strategy) is highly influenced by the initial distribution of opinions. This suggests that having a preliminary knowledge of stakeholders’ opinions can be helpful to arrange the participation process and repeated interaction opportunities contribute in smoothing diverging opinions.

4. Conclusions and discussions

In this paper an agent-based model is presented to reproduce the social interaction in a participatory decision-making process about a transport decision. Social interaction is reproduced via a multi-state opinion dynamics model with 3 different opinions (approval, disapproval, neutral opinion). The model was applied in a very simple case study, both to test the model and to capture the intrinsic essence of the complex phenomena of social interaction. The decision-making process regards the introduction of a parking charge inside a University Campus, where a restricted and homogeneous community of people (professors) with the same interest made quite reasonable the simple opinion dynamics model we implemented. Simulation results show that a high connectivity helps the communication among nodes, in particular when different departments are highly connected, and it takes few time to reach the final decision; on the contrary, few links slow down the process and sometimes it requires too much time to reach consensus or dissent. A substantial majority in favour of the proposal would likely lead to consensus, while the outcome is not trivial with more divergent opinions or when the favourable group is composed of influential agents.