Using a Multi-Agent-System to assess the sensitivity of a flexible transport

This paper presents a method to evaluate the sensitivity of a cooperating flexible transport system based on agents (taxis and clients) and simulated using NetLogo (Multi-Agent Systems application). Analysing a set of scenarios on a range of synthetic populations (clients) and on various networks, the authors assess the sensitivity of transport models according to flow configurations and system parameters. The research leads to two main results: (1) there exists a quasi-optimal balance between the frequency of system iterations (number of clients generations) and the total number of clients involved in simulations, according to the capacity of the fleet; (2) to some extend, the network topological structure plays a non negligible role in transport efficiency.