From Traditional to Automated Mobility on Demand: A Comprehensive Framework for Modeling On-Demand Services in SimMobility

Mobility on demand (MoD) systems have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sustainable personal urban mobility in cities. In the context of multi-agent simulation technology, the state-of-the-art lacks a platform that captures the dynamics between decentralized driver decision-making and the centralized coordinated decision-making. This work aims to fill this gap by introducing a comprehensive framework that models various facets of MoD, namely heterogeneous MoD driver decision-making and coordinated fleet management within SimMobility, an agent- and activity-based demand model integrated with a dynamic multi-modal network assignment model. To facilitate such a study, we propose an event-based modeling framework. Behavioral models were estimated to characterize the decision-making of drivers using a GPS dataset from a major MoD fleet operator in Singapore. The proposed framework was designed to accommodate behaviors of multiple on-demand services such as traditional MoD, Lyft-like services, and automated MoD (AMoD) services which interact with traffic simulators and a multi-modal transportation network. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed framework through a large-scale case study in Singapore comparing the fully decentralized traditional MoD with the future AMoD services in a realistic simulation setting. We found that AMoD results in a more efficient service even with increased demand. Parking strategies and fleet sizes will also have an effect on user satisfaction and network performance.