Agent-Based Model for Urban Administration: A Case Study of Bridge Construction and its Traffic Dispersion Effect

: From the viewpoint of urban administration, simulation is regarded as a policy tool that provides administrators with information about the current urban situation and enables them to verify the effectiveness of urban policies. This study proposes a traffic simulation model for a real city named Sejong in South Korea. Our proposed model employs agent-based simulation with the city-level real data, which mainly focuses on describing the movement behavior of individuals using urban traffics in the real city. By aggregating the agents’ decisions and interactions during the movement, the proposed model can discover a demand for the city’s transportation system. To do this, this study validated the proposed model so that the modeled traffic system was similar to the real one, and then we conducted a case study to compare and analyze the effects of traffic dispersion led by the upcoming bridge construction in the real city. The case study showed that the proposed model can provide policy evaluation on the optimal location of the bridge construction considering the city traffic flow. Furthermore, the case study presented that the agent-based modeling enables micro-level analysis on the city traffic flow to understand on the policy implications.