Modelling individuals for simulating contemporary mobility scenarios

Nguyen, Johannes

Abstract

Urban traffic is a system prone to overload, often approaching breakdown during rush hour times. Well-adjusted modifications of traffic policies, with appropriate interventions, promise potential improvements by inducing change in both individual as well as global system behaviour. However, truly effective measures are hard to identify, and testing in vivo is at least expensive and often hardly feasible. Agent-based traffic simulations are an established instrument to develop and assess policy interventions in silico but need to be further researched. In particular, better access to real-time information and a growing portfolio of mobility services have improved the flexibility in the personal mobility of individuals and thus require simulations to capture a more detailed modelling of the goals and purpose in their travel behaviour. Therefore, this thesis provides a systematic survey of existing traffic simulators, examining their ability to model individuals and their behaviour, and presents a modelling method based on semantic technology that allows preferences and personal objectives of individuals to be modelled as determining factors of agent decisions. The use of semantic technology helps to reduce the complexity during the modelling process. Furthermore, this thesis proposes a graphical notation that can capture the hierarchical structure of cause-effect relations in multi-agent models as well as a method to automatically extract cause-effect relations from the simulation at runtime. This allows implementations of simulation models to be reverse engineered, ensuring that the increasing complexity of the model does not further compromise the ability to understand the internal mechanisms of the simulation, which holds the potential to become an integral part of the structural validation of agent-based simulations. The thesis provides examples of implementation and gives demonstration of the proposed methods for artificial use cases.

Citation

Nguyen, J. Modelling individuals for simulating contemporary mobility scenarios. (Thesis). Edinburgh Napier University

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jan 8, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 8, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17869/enu.2024.4045579
• Award Date: Oct 31, 2024