Immense Paper Published in Transportation Journal
June has seen the long-awaited on-line publication of our scientific paper about ride-share in the MERGE Greenwich project in the journal, Transportation .
Immense were really excited when the emerging methods sub-committee of Transportation Research Board (TRB) not only selected our paper written for the January 2019 annual meeting as a poster for the Self-Driving, Sharing, and On-Demand Adoption session but also invited us to make a presentation at the annual emerging methods meeting.
The icing on the cake was the reviewers’ recommendation for publication in a special TRB edition of Transportation. With its focuses on policy and the day-to-day operational management of transport systems, we gladly accepted the invitation because of the respect for Transportation in the transportation sector recognised by its high impact factor (#11/155 journals).
Previously the MERGE Greenwich consortium report only summarised our simulation approach, even though modelling was crucial to understanding the impact of different service-design configurations for autonomous vehicle ride-sharing services for transport systems of the future. The Transportation paper allows us a fuller description of our simulation approach.
Entitled “Simulating a rich ride-share mobility service using agent-based models” the paper shows the novel integration of two independent agent-based simulators, MATSim and IMSim. MATSim generates a realistic transport demand for a city according to the best mobility options to satisfy traveller preferences while IMSim provides a highly realistic operational execution of autonomous and manually driven transport fleets. By combining the two simulators, we can evaluate the impact of diverse Mobility on demand scenarios from different standpoints: from a traveller’s perspective (e.g. satisfaction, service level, etc.); from an operator’s perspectives (e.g. cost, revenue, etc.); and from a city’s perspective (e.g. congestion, significant shifts between transport modes, etc.).
Our technical operation manager, David Kelsall, commented, “I’m really pleased with the publication of our paper in such a prestigious journal. It demonstrates our desire to do things well and stand the test of academic scrutiny.”
