The Multi-Agent Transport Simulation MATSim

"The MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) software project was started around 2006 with the goal of generating traffic and congestion patterns by following individual synthetic travelers through their daily or weekly activity programme. It has since then evolved from a collection of stand-alone C++ programs to an integrated Java-based framework which is publicly hosted, open-source available, automatically regression tested. It is currently used by about 40 groups throughout the world. This book takes stock of the current status. The first part of the book gives an introduction to the most important concepts, with the intention of enabling a potential user to set up and run basic simulations.The second part of the book describes how the basic functionality can be extended, for example by adding schedule-based public transit, electric or autonomous cars, paratransit, or within-day replanning. For each extension, the text provides pointers to the additional documentation and to the code base. It is also discussed how people with appropriate Java programming skills can write their own extensions, and plug them into the MATSim core. The project has started from the basic idea that traffic is a consequence of human behavior, and thus humans and their behavior should be the starting point of all modelling, and with the intuition that when simulations with 100 million particles are possible in computational physics, then behavior-oriented simulations with 10 million travelers should be possible in travel behavior research. The initial implementations thus combined concepts from computational physics and complex adaptive systems with concepts from travel behavior research. The third part of the book looks at theoretical concepts that are able to describe important aspects of the simulation system; for example, under certain conditions the code becomes a Monte Carlo engine sampling from a discrete choice model. Another important aspect is the interpretation of the MATSim score as utility in the microeconomic sense, opening up a connection to benefit cost analysis. Finally, the book collects use cases as they have been undertaken with MATSim. All current users of MATSim were invited to submit their work, and many followed with sometimes crisp and short and sometimes longer contributions, always with pointers to additional references. We hope that the book will become an invitation to explore, to build and to extend agent-based modeling of travel behavior from the stable and well tested core of MATSim documented here.

Development of a decision support tool for transit network design evaluation

Municipalities increasingly have less financial resources to spend on implementation of transport strategies and plans. This situation is putting pressure on transport professionals to minimize wasteful expenditure on projects that do not deliver high transport service improvements. As such, the need for efficient, pragmatic decision making on policy direction, infrastructure expenditure, or any transport interventions is becoming very critical. Thus, transport professionals are increasingly in need of tools to help them predict with increased accuracy the outcomes of their intended transport interventions. The City of Cape Town has a Bus Rapid Transport system called MyCiTi. Current MyCiTi operations are incurring losses. The service is kept running on the back of subsidies from the federal government. There is a need for rationalization of the system. However, with strained resources, the interventions on the system have to guarantee improvements. Overemphasis on the ability of MyCiTi BRT service to support transportation during the 2010 soccer world cup event heavily influenced the design of the network. As a result, network appraisal is one area that can be done on the system to identify areas of improvement. In this thesis, decision making support will be demonstrated using a network design appraisal process for the MyCiTi BRT system in Cape Town. The existing MyCiTi network will undergo network improvement using heuristic node insertion technique leading to multiple network scenarios in a modeling environment. Agent-Based demand mobility behavior simulation will be used on each of the network scenarios to come up with network performance indicators. These network performance indicators will be used in the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) model to come up with a ranking of the network scenarios and help in deciding on the optimum network improvement intervention. Overall, findings of this research show the importance of weighting of the performance indicators. Where networks that score well in the performance indicator with the high weights also rank high. In conclusion, the study has demonstrated the importance of decision making support in interventions on complex systems like bus systems. Recommendations on the possible avenues of research stemming from this thesis have also been outlined

The correlation of externalities in marginal cost pricing: lessons learned from a real-world case study

Negative externalities cause inefficiencies in the allocation of capacities and resources in a transport system. Marginal social cost pricing allows to correct for these inefficiencies in a simulation environment and to derive real-world policy recommendations. In this context, it has been shown for analytical models considering more than one externality, that the correlation between the externalities needs to be taken into account. Typically, in order to avoid overpricing, this is performed by introducing correction factors which capture the correlation effect. However, the correlation structure between, say, emission and congestion externalities changes for every congested facility over time of day. This makes it close to impossible to calculate the factors analytically for large-scale systems. Hence, this paper presents a simulation-based approach to calculate and internalize the correct dynamic price levels for both externalities simultaneously. For a real-world case study, it is shown that the iterative calculation of prices based on cost estimates from the literature allows to identify the amplitude of the correlation between the two externalities under consideration: for the urban travelers of the case study, emission toll levels—without pricing congestion—turn out to be 4.0% too high in peak hours and 2.8% too high in off-peak hours. In contrary, congestion toll levels—without pricing emissions—are overestimated by 3.0% in peak hours and by 7.2% in off-peak hours. With a joint pricing policy of both externalities, the paper shows that the approach is capable to determine the amplitude of the necessary correction factors for large-scale systems. It also provides the corrected average toll levels per vehicle kilometer for peak and off-peak hours for the case study under consideration: again, for urban travelers, the correct price level for emission and congestion externalities amounts approximately to 38 EURct/km in peak hours and to 30 EURct/km in off-peak hours. These toll levels can be used to derive real-world pricing schemes. Finally, the economic assessment indicators for the joint pricing policy provided in the paper allow to compare other policies to this benchmark state of the transport system

Using MATSim as a Component in Dynamic Agent-Based Micro-Simulations

This paper discusses use of the widely used transport simulator, MATSim, as one component in a large complex agent based microsimulation where dynamic changes in the environment require the agents to be reactive as well as goal directed. We describe a number of refinements to MATSim that have been made to facilitate its use within our deployed wildfire evacuation applications, as well as some tools that have been developed which complement MATSim. All code is freely available under open source licenses. As applications increasingly require complex microsimulations, with many aspects, it is important to use existing software where possible. However most simulation systems, like MATSim, have been developed as standalone systems. We identify ways that MATSim has needed to be extended or modified in order for it to be used as a component in a larger whole. The paper provides details that will be useful for anyone wanting to use MATSim within their specific application

An initial implementation of multiagent simulation of travel behavior for a medium-sized city in China

Since the traditional four-step model is so simple that it cannot solve complex modern transportation problems, microsimulation is gradually applied for transportation planning and some researches indicate that it is more compatible and realistic. In this paper, a framework of agent-based simulation of travel behavior is proposed, which is realized by MATSim, a simulation tool developed for large-scale agent-based simulation. MATSim is currently developed and some of its models are under training, so a detailed introduction of simulation structure and preparation of input data will be presented. In practice, the preparation process differs from one to another in different simulation projects because the available data for simulation is various. Thus, a simulation of travel behavior under a condition of limited available survey data will be studied based on MATSim; furthermore, a medium-sized city in China will be taken as an example to check whether agent-based simulation of travel behavior can be successfully applied in China

Bicycle superhighway: An environmentally sustainable policy for urban transport

Bicycle is a sustainable low-carbon transport mode. However, insufficient or unplanned infrastructure leads to decrease in the share of bicycle in many cities of developing nations. In order to increase the bicycle share and to provide safer, faster and more direct routes, a bicycle superhighway is proposed for urban areas. This study identifies the potential of increase in the bicycle share. For maximum utilization of the new infrastructure, an algorithm is presented to identify the optimum number and locations of the connectors between proposed new infrastructure and existing network. Household income levels are incorporated into the decision making process of individual travellers for a better understanding of the modal shift. A real-world case study of Patna, India is chosen to show the application of the proposed superhighway. It is shown that for Patna, the bicycle share can escalate as high as 48% up from 32% by providing this kind of infrastructure. However, together with bicycles, allowing motorbikes on the superhighway limits the bicycle share to 44%. The increase in bicycle share is mainly a result of people switching from motorbike, public transport and walk to the bicycle. Further, to evaluate the benefits of the bicycle superhighway, this study first extends an emission modelling tool to estimate the time-dependent, vehicle-specific emissions under mixed traffic conditions. Allowing only bicyclists on the superhighway improves congested urban areas, reduces emissions, and increases accessibility. However, allowing motorbikes on the superhighway increases emissions significantly in the central part of the urban area and reduces accessibilities by bicycle mode to education facilities which are undesirable. This study elicits that a physically segregated high-quality bicycle superhighway will not only attract current non-cyclist travellers and increase the share of the bicycle mode, but will also reduce negative transport externalities significantly

Optimization and simulation of fixed-time traffic signal control in real-world applications

This paper contributes to the question how to optimize fixed-time traffic signal coordinations for real-world applications. Therefore, two models are combined: An analytically model that optimizes fixed-time plans based on a cyclically time-expanded network formulation, and a coevolutionary transport simulation that is able to evaluate the optimized fixed-time plans for large-scale realistic traffic situations. The coupling process of both models is discussed and applied to a real-world scenario. Steps that were necessary to align the models and improve the results are presented. The optimized fixed-time signals are compared to other signal approaches in the application. It is found, that they also help to improve the performance of actuated signal control

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio