A Systems Level Approach To The Design Evaluation And Optimization Of Electrified Transportation Networks Using Agent Based Modeling

Rising concerns related to the effects of traffic congestion have led to the search for alternative transportation solutions. Advances in battery technology have resulted in an increase of electric vehicles (EVs), which serve to reduce the impact of many of the negative consequences of congestion, including pollution and the cost of wasted fuel. Furthermore, the energy-efficiency and quiet operation of electric motors have made feasible concepts such as Urban Air Mobility (UAM), in which electric aircraft transport passengers in dense urban areas prone to severe traffic slowdowns. Electrified transportation may be the solution needed to combat urban gridlock, but many logistical questions related to the design and operation of the resultant transportation networks remain to be answered.

This volume brings together works resulting from research carried out by members of the EURO Working Group on Transportation (EWGT) and presented during meetings and workshops organized by the Group under the patronage of the Association of European Operational Research Societies in 2012 and 2013. The main targets of the EWGT include providing a forum to share research information and experience, encouraging joint research and the development of both theoretical methods and applications, and promoting cooperation among the many institutions and organizations which are leaders at national level in the field of transportation and logistics. The primary fields of interest concern operational research methods, mathematical models and computation algorithms, to solve and sustain solutions to problems mainly faced by public administrations, city authorities, public transport companies, service providers and logistic operators. Related areas of interest are: land use and transportation planning, traffic control and simulation models, traffic network equilibrium models, public transport planning and management, applications of combinatorial optimization, vehicle routing and scheduling, intelligent transport systems, logistics and freight transport, environment problems, transport safety, and impact evaluation methods. In this volume, attention focuses on the following topics of interest: · Decision-making and decision support · Energy and Environmental Impacts · Urban network design · Optimization and simulation · Traffic Modelling, Control and Network Traffic Management · Transportation Planning · Mobility, Accessibility and Travel Behavior · Vehicle Routing

The overall purpose of this evaluation was to understand the effect of the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Research and Technology Program activities on the implementation of agent-based approaches to transportation-related projects and activities. Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) uses individual “agents,” typically drivers and agencies, to model changes in transportation networks and systems. Researchers and industry stakeholders view ABMS and the data-collection and validation processes that ABMS requires as a valuable, emerging practice that can be used to advance existing transportation-modeling and simulation techniques. ABMS can also be used for various transportation applications, including planning, operations, and safety countermeasures. As a result, the discipline and community are growing, and usage of ABMS approaches is expanding. The evaluation team assessed the role the FHWA Exploratory Advanced Research (EAR) Program played in this growth and how the EAR Program–funded research led to further developments and advancements. Beginning in 2009, the FHWA EAR Program began investigating the use of agent-based modeling techniques for characterizing driver and traveler behavior. The EAR Program sought to address technological advancements being applied to vehicles within the transportation network.

This book introduces transportation engineering students and junior engineers to the concept of transportation network modeling, network coding, model calibration and validation, and model evaluation. Transportation scientists employ modeling and simulation techniques to capture the complexities of transportation systems and develop and assess solutions to alleviate existing and future transportation-related problems. This book introduces transportation engineering students and junior engineers to the concept of transportation network modeling, network coding, model calibration and validation, and model evaluation. Travel demand models are sensitive to demographic changes and can explain and forecast how a new transportation supply system leads to a new transportation demand pattern. This book also describes how demand models evolved from trip-based to the newer generation of activity-based and agent-based to overcome some of the shortcomings of the four-step approach and improve models’ prediction power.

The autonomous vehicle (AV) is poised to be one of the most disruptive technologies in the transportation industry. The advent of three major trends in transportation: automation, on-demand mobility and ride-sharing, are set to revolutionize the way we travel. The forthcoming adoption and commercialization of AVs are expected to have extensive impacts on our road networks, congestion, safety, land use, public transportation (PT) and more. Rapid advances in AV technology are convincing many that AV services will play a significant role in future transportation systems. The advancement of AVs presents both opportunities and threats to transportation. It has the potential to significantly impact traffic congestion, traffic accidents, parking and VMT (vehicle miles traveled), especially for people that are not able to drive such as children and elderly people. Motivated by the potential of autonomous vehicles, authorities around the world are preparing for this revolution in transport and deems this an important research direction that requires significant investigation. This thesis tackled and contributed to three main research questions related to the impact of autonomous vehicles on transportation systems. First, this thesis proposes a simulation-based approach to the design and evaluation of integrated autonomous vehicle and public transportation systems. We highlight the transit-orientation by respecting the social-purpose considerations of transit agencies (such as maintaining service availability and ensuring equity) and identifying the synergistic opportunities between AV and PT. Specifically, we identified that AV has a strong potential to serve first-mile connections to the PT stations and provide efficient and affordable shared mobility in low-density suburban areas that are typically inefficient to serve by conventional fixed-route PT services. The design decisions reflect the interest of multiple stakeholders in the system. Second, the interaction between travelers (demand) and operators (supply) is modeled using a system of equations that is solved as a fixed-point problem through an iterative procedure. In this, we developed demand and supply as two sub-problems. The demand will be predicted using a nested logit model to estimate the volume for different modes based on modal attributes. The supply will use a simulation platform capable of incorporating critical operational decisions on factors including fleet sizes, vehicle capacities, sharing policies, fare schemes and hailing strategies such as in-advance and on-demand requests. Using feedback between demand and supply, we enable interactions between the decisions of the service operator and those of the travelers, in order to model the choices of both parties. Finally, this thesis systematically optimizes service design variables to determine the best outcome in accordance to AV+PT stakeholder goals. Optimization objective functions can be formulated to reflect the different objectives of different stakeholders. In this paper, we specifically propose and develop a simulation-based service design method where we quantify various benefits and costs to reflect the objectives of key AV+PT stakeholders. We simulate the service with different sets of system settings and identify the highest performing set. We employ a case study of regional service contracting to showcase the ability of this method to inform AV+PT service design. We tested our approach with a case study area in a major European city on an agent-based simulation platform, amod-abm. Agent-based simulation has the advantage of capturing individual (agent) behaviors and the interactions of the various individual agents in a realistic synthetic environment where the intent is to re-create a complex phenomenon of mobility on demand service delivered by AV. Although this thesis will focus on a major European city, the general framework and methodologies proposed here can be widely applicable. The thesis concludes that the demand-supply interaction can be effective for designing and assessing the role of AV technology in our mobility systems. Moreover, simulation-based optimization can be an effective method for transit agencies to make decisions that support their overall AV related transport strategy as well as operational planning.

This book seeks to summarize our recent progress in dynamic trans portation network modeling. It concentrates on ideal dynamic network models based on actual travel times and their corresponding solution algorithms. In contrast, our first book DynamIc Urban Transportation Network Models - The ory and Implications for Intelligent Vehicle-Hzghway Systems (Springer-Verlag, 1994) focused on instantaneous dynamic network models. Comparing the two books, the major differences can be summarized as follows: 1. This book uses the variational inequality problem as the basic formulation approach and considers the optimal control problem as a subproblem for solution purposes. The former book used optimal control theory as the basic formulation approach, which caused critical problems in some circumstances. 2. This book focuses on ideal dynamic network models based on actual travel times. The former book focused on instantaneous dynamic network models based on currently prevailing travel times. 3. This book formulates a stochastic dynamic route choice model which can utilize any possible route choice distribution function instead of only the logit function. 4. This book reformulates the bilevel problem of combined departure time/ route choice as a one-level variational inequality. 5. Finally, a set of problems is provided for classroom use. In addition, this book offers comprehensive insights into the complexity and challenge of applying these dynamic network models to Intelligent Trans portation Systems (ITS). Nevertheless, the models in this text are not yet fully evaluated and are subject to revision based on future research.

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.

"This book provides a rigorous and comprehensive coverage of transportation models and planning methods and is a must-have to anyone in the transportation community, including students, teachers, and practitioners." Moshe Ben-Akiva, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.