Analyzing On-Demand Mobility Services by Agent-Based Simulation

Abstract

Widespread adoption of smartphones and ubiquitous internet connectivity gives rise to new markets for personalized and efficient on-demand mobility services. To rigorously analyze new control mechanisms for these services, we introduce an open-source agent-based simulation testbed that allows evaluating the performance of demand-responsive transport schemes. In particular, our testbed provides a framework to compare both centralized and decentralized, static and dynamic passenger allocation and vehicle routing mechanisms under various conditions; including varying vehicle fleets, road network topologies and passenger demands. The testbed supports all stages of the experimental process; from the implementation of control mechanisms and the definition of experiment scenarios, through to simulation execution, analysis, and interpretation of results. Ultimately, our testbed accelerates the development of control mechanisms for emerging on-demand mobility services and facilitates their comparison with well-defined benchmarks. We illustrate our approach on an example simulation study of standard taxi and taxi sharing services in the area of Sydney, Australia.