Integrated agent-based microsimulation framework for examining impacts of mobility-oriented policies

ORCID Identifiers

0000-0002-1386-2932

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Abstract

© 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature. Travel demand management measures/policies are important to sustain positive changes among individuals’ travel behaviour. An integrated agent-based microsimulation platform provides a rich framework for examining such interventions to assess their impacts using indicators about demand as well as supply side. This paper presents an approach where individual schedules, derived from a lighter version of an activity-based model, are fed into a Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSIM) framework. Simulations are performed for two European cities i.e. Hasselt (Belgium) and Bologna (Italy). After calibrating the modelling framework against aggregate traffic counts for the base case, the impacts of a few traffic management policies (restricting car access, increase in bus frequency) are examined. The results indicate that restricting car access is more effective in terms of reducing traffic from the network and also shifting car drivers/passengers to other modes of travel. The enhancement of bus infrastructure in relation to increase in frequency caused shifting of bicyclist towards public transport, which is an undesirable result of the policy if the objective is to improve sustainability and environment. In future research, the framework will be enhanced to integrate emission and air dispersion models to ascertain effects on air quality as a result of such interventions.

ISSN

1617-4909

Publisher

Springer

Last Page

13

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Keywords

Activity-travel behaviour, Calibration, Increase in bus frequency, Integrated microsimulation platform, Restricting car access

Scopus ID

85078265399

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository

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