Iterative urban design and transport simulation using Sketch MATSim

ABSTRACT

New transport technologies have historically influenced how cities are shaped, while urban form is known to influence travel behaviour. But this reciprocal relationship is seldom operationalized in practice due to the disciplinary gap between urban design and transport planning. The two are often linked through a ‘predict and provide’ workflow, which is problematic in the context of emerging technologies such as AVs. This paper argues for a more iterative design and transport simulation workflow, through design experiments. One design experiment is illustrated using Sketch MATSim, to investigate the impact of network design on the performance of shared automated vehicles.

KEYWORDS:

• Transport simulation
• autonomous vehicles
• planning support tools
• MATSim
• shared mobility

Acknowledgments

This material is based on research supported by the Singapore Ministry of National Development and National Research Foundation. The research was conducted at the Future Cities Laboratory at the Singapore-ETH Centre, which was established collaboratively between ETH Zurich and Singapore’s National Research Foundationunder its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise programme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. When a user requests a DRT, the router searches for vehicles within 7 minutes’ travel time from the user (this is pre-calculated based on link travel time in the previous iteration). If no vehicle can reach the user within 7 minutes, the DRT request is considered ‘rejected’. Eventually, the user may have to wait longer than 7 minutes due to congestion. Rejection rates can be very high if there is a high level of congestion or low provision of vehicles.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of National Development - Singapore [L2NICTDF1-2016-3]; National Research Foundation Singapore [FI 370074016].