Inst.f. Verkehrsplanung/Transportsysteme, ETHZ
January 15, 2008, 11:15, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)
Multi-agent micro-simulation is becoming increasingly important in traffic simulation, traffic analysis, and traffic forecasting. It allows one to model the decision making processes of each single individual explicitly. This is of importance since it is not a vehicle which produces traffic; it is the person who drives the vehicle. Persons do not just produce traffic; instead each of them tries to manage his/her day (week, life) in a satisfying way. Therefore, the decision makers do not only base their decisions on a specific part of their day (i.e. a single trip), each decision is a result of their complete daily needs. So, some of the major challenges in multi-agent transport simulations are - to model the success of a complete individual daily demand, - to model the decisions of each individual based on the success-rate of his/her demand, - to model the diversity of adaption of each individual daily demand to achieve a more successful day, - and---last but not least---to reach a (globally) stable state for all individuals synchronously. We present the open source project MATSim-T (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit), a modular approach for large scale scenarios to optimize individual (daily) demand. While the system is able to cope with transport scenarios of millions of individuals, the models are very simple in respect to travel behavior. This presentation is meant to produce a open discussion in the topic of individual decision making processes within MATSim.