Integrated Land Use Transportation Environment Model System- A Microsimulation Framework

An urban system is a multi-dimensional and complex space consisting of many components notably including transportation systems, buildings and land uses, vehicles, environment, and human beings. Traditionally, most metropolitan areas have used different forms of the 4-stage, trip-based travel demand modelling framework (which has been the standard paradigm for urban travel demand modelling since the 1950’s) that ignores real-time interactions between transportation and land use systems. Integrated land-use ‒ transportation model systems attempt to simulate the evolution of an urban system in addition to the associated evolution of travel demand in a comprehensive, integrated, and two-way interaction fashion. This paper presents an integrated micro-simulation framework called ILUTE (Integrated Land Use Transportation Environment) and examines its power by comparing the simulated results from the demographic updating and transportation (TASHA- Travel Activity Scheduler for Household Agents) modules with real data: census data provided by Statistics Canada and traffic data provided by Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS). A full synthetic population of base year (1986) of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) is used as the starting point for undertaking twenty-year historical simulations (1986-2006). In order to run the complex and extensive full population simulation, parallel programming and a high performance cloud computing platform from IBM-Canada are used in this study which decreases the simulation runtime significantly.

Keywords:

Transportation Models , Land Use Models , Integrated Models , Micro-simulation