Shopping Malls Accessibility Evaluation Based on Microscopic Traffic Flow Simulation

Abstract

The task of shopping mall accessibility evaluation is a vivid problem from a business perspective and in the same time from the public sector and urban development. Business entities are interested to have higher accessibility level to increase the profit in the same time the public sector is interested in sustainable development of the urban areas. Current paper presents the approach to evaluate accessibility of the shopping malls by the visitors based on microscopic traffic flow simulation. The proposed approach in based on idea, that the “last mile” challenge in logistics is also actual in case of the shopping malls. The main factors influencing “last mile” in this case are: usually location of the shopping malls is planned to have maximum of passing flows, it means that a network around shopping mall could be congested much and it is quit problematic to get into shopping mall; usually the number of parking lots are limited and in case of shopping mall popularity visitors are spending significant amount of time to find the free lots; also, a very important issue is related with leaving the shopping mall parking area, as it could be the situation that it is easier to get in when to get out from parking. To evaluate the influence of the mentioned above factors to the accessibility it is proposed to utilize microscopic traffic flow simulation. The paper formulates the methodology for evaluation of accessibility of the shopping malls and demonstrates its applicability based on case study.