Design and Analysis of a MATSim Scenario From Open Data: The Messina City Use Case

In the last years, our cities become more and more crowded due to the increasing number of cars into old city planes. So, even small/medium cities experience a travel time comparable with the bigger ones. To improve mobility management in modern cities, specific simulation tools can be used to analyze the impact of different mobility plans on mobility and, therefore to find the most suitable solution for each city. However, these tools are often hard to be used by city traffic managers without advanced computer skills. In this article, we used a multiagent transport simulation (MATSim) to provide a simple tool that can be easily used by end-users to better plan mobility strategies for both private and public transportation. In particular, starting from the open data provided by the city of Messina, we have implemented a software tool able to process MATSim events. Moreover, we propose a metric to estimate the safety of roads for cyclists. From the experimental results provided by the proposed software, we are able to discover the most overloaded links and estimate the travel time distribution by hour of departure time.