Andreas Neumann

Passenger Agent and Paratransit Operator Reaction to Changes of Service Frequency of a Fixed Train Line

Abstract Public transport companies should run sustainable transit lines and demand oriented services. This paper presents an enhanced evolutionary model, presented earlier, for the design of demand responsive routes and transport networks. The approach adopts the survival of the fittest principle from competitive developing world paratransit systems with respect to vehicles, market actor characteristics, route patterns and route functions. The model is integrated into a microscopic multi-agent simulation framework, and successfully applied to illustrative scenarios. The scenarios include the inter- action of paratransit services with conventional public transport. With limited resources paratransit services compete and cooperate with each other to find sustainable routes, which compete or complement existing public transport lines. Besides providing a starting point for paratransit modeling of a region, the approach can also be used to identify areas with insufficient supply of public transport.

Simulation of Urban Traffic Control: A Queue Model Approach

Abstract This paper aims at an agent-based simulation of the interplay between two types of agents within a transport system: travelers, and traffic signals. For the simulation of this interplay, a computationally efficient traffic model is needed. It is thus shown how queue models can be used to model traffic flow and spill-back at signalized intersections.

Why closing an Airport May not Matter – The Impact of the Relocation of TXL Airport on the Bus Network of Berlin

This paper investigates the closure of TXL airport and its impact on the bus network of Berlin. The results of the scenario are based on a co-evolutionary algorithm for public transit network design. The algorithm is integrated in a multi-modal multi-agent simulation. In the simulation, competing minibus operators start exploring the public transport market offering their services. With more successful operators expanding and less successful operators going bankrupt, a sustainable network of minibus services evolves. In the TXL scenario, the impact of the massive change in demand is found to be locally confined. Only transit lines serving TXL airport directly are affected. Furthermore, transit lines are found to have a higher probability of surviving if connecting two different activity centers, e.g. transit hubs. Following a hub-and-spoke approach by letting the line end in low-demand areas renders a line less attractive because of a reduced connectivity, e.g. to one train station only.