Microsimulation of Demand and Supply of Autonomous Mobility On Demand

Agent-based models have gained wide acceptance in transportation planning because with increasing computational power, large-scale people-centric mobility simulations are possible. Several modeling efforts have been reported in the literature on the demand side (with sophisticated activity-based models that focus on an individual’s day activity patterns) and on the supply side (with detailed representation of network dynamics through simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment models). This paper proposes an extension to a state-of-the-art integrated agent-based demand and supply model—SimMobility—for the design and evaluation of autonomous vehicle systems. SimMobility integrates various mobility-sensitive behavioral models in a multiple time-scale structure comprising three simulation levels: (a) a long-term level that captures land use and economic activity, with special emphasis on accessibility; (b) a midterm level that handles agents’ activities and travel patterns; and (c) a short-term level that si...