Urban Facilities - A Spatial and Timewise Decision Support Model

Abstract

Planners have difficulty in designing transport systems to meet the specific needs of a population in a particular area of study. The most common issues that arise are: How many service facilities should be deployed? Where should they be located? If the demand is not being met satisfactorily, when to expand the system? The objective of this research was to present decision support model developed to help urban planners to dimension and locate urban facilities, as well as to define their expansion phases. In this research, to spatial allocation, we used an adaptation of the p-median model that presents as an advantage the possibility of minimizing the sum of the costs associated with a pre-established number of available urban equipment. Since the demand for the services commonly increases over time, it is natural that after a period the available equipment cannot meet the demand adequately, in other words, are overburdened. The propose model aims at determining the time lapse after which the system should be reviewed, based upon the evolution of the service demand curve on the many districts of the area of study. The time lapse for the system review is considered as the time in which the demand function of any district reaches a value in which the service installation is not able to supply with a minimum service level. With information about the size of the system to be deployed and forecasts of its future expansion needs, the administrator would be better able to do a good urban planning.