Impact of Travelers Information Level on Disturbed Transit Networks: A Multiagent Simulation

With the generalization of real-time traveler information, the behavior of modern transport networks becomes harder to analyze and to predict. It is now critical to develop simulation tools for mobility policies makers, taking into account this new information environment. Information is now individualized, and the interaction of a population of individually guided travelers have to be taken into account in the simulations. Multiagent simulation is proving to be a powerful model for analyzing transport activities. Indeed, autonomous agents provide an appropriate basis for modeling heterogeneous systems and environment-based systems. In this paper, we present a multiagent simulation model to measure the impact of information provision on the quality of passengers travels. This impact is measured by simulating different scenarios in function of the percentage of connected travelers, represented as agents. These simulated scenarios are analyzed following their impact on the average travel times of the travelers. Results show that the number of connected travelers has a positive impact on overall travel times up until a certain threshold before becoming negative.