Agent based modelling of Community Involvement in Transport Planning

Community Involvement, Public Engagement, Stakeholder Engagement, are all different ways to name the participation process of interested people to public decisions. In transport planning there are lots of decisions concerning several issues, with diverse stakeholders involved from organizations to citizens. Sometimes involvement is just a single, compulsory moment of the decision-making process and it lacks in its real purpose: engaging people to find the most shared solution in the shortest time. Building the network of relationships among stakeholders and analysing the opinion dynamics which leads to the final decision it can be possible to understand how the process of making choices takes place. The methodology presented in this work, based on a sociophysics opinion dynamics model, can improve the knowledge of consensus formation and it can represent a useful tool for a good involvement process.