No accounting for shoppers?

During the design and management of a covered shopping centre, reliable information on actual or potential pedestrian flows at the centre is of great value for the decision-makers. Whilst pedestrian-flow information is regarded as crucial, there is no widely-accepted methodology employed in practice to generate the data. Some imaginative combination of existing Operational Research OR methods, such as ‘flows in networks’ and ‘simulation’, which is flexible enough to allow subjective (local management) interventions, would appear to have promise. This article presents some examples of shopping-centre management ‘problems’, and identifies some issues for the modeller.