VACANCY INTERNSHIP PROJECT We are looking for students interested in carrying out their internship project at DAT.Mobility
Adding attraction constraints to an agent-based travel demand model Problem description Recently, DAT.Mobility has added the agent based travel demand model BRUTUS to OmniTRANS transport planning software (see https://tinyurl.com/y96m54kp , https://www.mobilitymodeling.com/brutus/ and https://www.dat.nl/omnitrans/ for more info). This model describes the number of trip chains along with their destinations and modes for all persons and households within the study area. Although behaviorally more accurate, BRUTUS in its current form has a disadvantage when it comes to strategic applications: it does not contain trip attraction constraints. Although usually the trip production constraints keep the attractions in balance, the model does not guarantee that the number of trips arriving at a destination matches the number of arrivals that is to be expected given the number of jobs, shops and other attraction variables. In traditional aggregated gravity models, explicit attraction constraints can be set and the model is guaranteed to respect these. However, it is unknown to what extent the agent based modelling paradigm facilitates for such constraints.
Internship / Master thesis assignment The goal of this research is to add trip attraction constraints to the current BRUTUS implementation. Talks and e-mail conversations with researchers and practitioners that claim to have added attraction constraints to agent-based travel demand models indicate that it should be possible to do so. However, it is unknown to what extent the methods they describe are suitable within the context of BRUTUS. Therefore a literature research into trip attraction constraints within agent-based travel demand models should be conducted to complete the overview of possible solution methods, possibly supplemented by your own ideas or methods. Good starting points might be (Davidson et al., 2011; Horni et al., 2011). Furthermore, the student should get acquainted with the current BRUTUS implementation. Then, one or some of the different methods should be implemented and tested, bearing in mind that reproducibility (or even better: uniqueness) of the solution, scalability and calculation time are the most important selection criteria. As BRUTUS is programmed in R, a good environment for prototyping is available, allowing to directly see the effect of changes to the implementation. If a suitable method has been found and implemented, a showcase comparing its results, sensitivity and calculation times to the current implementation should be developed.
Research group DAT.Mobility Deventer Daily supervisors: Ir. Luuk Brederode (DAT.Mobility, Delft University of Technology) / Bernike Rijksen Msc. (DAT.Mobility) When interested in this internship or Masters thesis assignment on stochasticity in agent based modelling, please contact Ir. Luuk Brederode (lbrederode@DAT.nl, +31 (0) 627369830)
References Davidson, B., Vovsha, P., Freedman, J., 2011. New Advancements in Activity-Based Models, in: Australasian Transport Research Forum 2011 Proceedings. Presented at the Australasian Transport Research Forum, Adelaide, Australia. Horni, A., Nagel, K., Axhausen, K.W., 2011. High-resolution destination choice in agent-based demand models. Work. Pap. Transp. Spat. Plan. 682.