Technical University of Berlin, Germany
September 15, 2008, 11:15, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)
MATSim stands for "Multi-Agent Transport Simulation". It is a behaviorally-based microscopic simulation of travel behavior and traffic flow. Conceptually, it combines an activity-based demand generation and a dynamic assignment into one coherent modelling and simulation package where synthetic travellers learn good or individually optimal behavior through many iterations. As the most important advantage of MATSim, detailed feedback from the traffic flow simulation is not only used for route choice, but also for other choice dimensions such as activity time scheduling and mode choice. The model is sensitive to policy measures since the synthetic travellers individually adapt to policy measures such as road closures, tolls, public transit price changes, etc. The adaptation is regulated by utility functions of the agents, which are related to utility functions in discrete choice theory, but not the same.
After studying physics and meteorology in Cologne and Paris, Kai Nagel got his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Cologne about "fast microscopic traffic simulations". From 1995 to 1999 he was at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the "TRANSIMS" team. 1999-2004 he was assistant professor for Computer Science at ETH Zurich at the Institute for Scientific Computing. Since 2004 he is full professor for ``Transport systems planning and transport telematics'' at the Technical University of Berlin. His research interests include: large transportation simulations, modeling and simulation of socio-economic systems, multi-agent simulations.