Project Summary
Cities of the future demand a paradigm shift with the emerging and rapidly changing landscape of autonomous vehicles, shared mobility, connected vehicle technologies, and systems integration. System modeling is a necessary tool to study various policy alternatives due to the increasing complexity of future travel options. Unlike traditional top-down approaches for transportation planning, current and future transportation systems require more detailed representation of the various entities that interact with one another in ways that may or may not be collaborative, and whose collective behavior can lead to many possible outcomes both good and bad. This project will develop a comprehensive agent-based framework for system modeling (termed Autonomicity) for a collection of city contexts with the associated networks, demand-generation modules, supply-side details, business models, vehicles, goods and travelers that encompass the full spectrum of mobility in a future city. Associated research projects can use the Autonomicity framework / model to study specific topics, such as, the effects of ride-sharing systems or autonomous vehicles on the transit systems, or the system-wide effects of user-side subscription services from Transportation Network Companies (TNCs).