This paper explores using a decision support tool, an already developed and preliminary tested system with highly parameterised Simulation and Optimisation engines. This tool manages the assignment of user requests to an intermodal transport system in which conventional transit transportation modes, buses, subways, railways, and trams, are complemented and coordinated with a ride-pooling service. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the suitability and sustainability of the intermodal transport system in terms of the reduction of emissions, number of conventional trips, and the policies efficiency depending on variable fleet sizes, detour penalties sensibility and fares. The computational tests have been conducted with a realistic Barcelona Metropolitan Area model. The results indicate a significant reduction in emissions with the implementation of ride-pooling services, both in multimodal and intermodal approaches, contributing to alleviating urban traffic congestion caused by private vehicles. A second contribution is the development and evaluation of a policy for the detour reduction of the services assigned to the requests, resulting in better routes with a smaller increase of the fare for already en-route passengers. Furthermore, the implementation of a variable active fleet policy involving a gradual adjustment of the operating number of vehicles during the start-up and shutdown of the system proves to be beneficial for the company in mitigating the system’s operational costs, especially in periods of lower demand, where maintaining a full-time fleet would incur in unnecessary expenses given the limited number of requests.

Mobility as a service, and its associated variants, has been proposed as a method to improve the sustainability of transport systems; however, most of the approaches that have been proposed so far have been unsuccessful or have worsened the situation. The work presented in this paper investigates an intermodal system that combines a ride-pooling service with a public transport network. The system is composed of a dedicated simulator that evaluates the transport scenario and an intermodal dispatcher that optimises the service according to requests, accounting for their time windows. This intermodal approach considers trips with multiple legs, for which either ride-pooling or public transport are used. This study investigates how the batch size and the early dispatching of the last leg, supported by a vehicle reservation strategy, impact diverse demand profiles that range from single-passenger to multiple-passenger requests, while also addressing the critical aspect of fleet size. The experimental setting used in this work is the metropolitan area of Barcelona; the experimentation results yield valuable insights into the functionality of the proposed intermodal system.

This paper provides a simulation and optimisation-based system to combine public transport (PT) with ride-pooling services (RP). According to the International Transport Forum (ITF), the RP could be established as a feeder of PT and included as the first or last leg of the journey with the option of transferring to/from PT in between. The system contains a dispatching core that uses an optimisation model with heuristic parameters to quickly analyse the potential permutations for each request. This topic is frequently based on simplistic modelling in the literature, and it has not been extensively tested in major urban regions. The whole metropolitan region of Barcelona is employed in this study, with a large realistic simulation model encompassing a 20 × 15 km area with a PT network of about 3000 stations and 300 route lines and nearly 114,000 traffic links. This enables for a more accurate evaluation of system performance and trip quality computation.

This paper describes the components of an intermodal dispatcher of ride pooling requests to integrate these urban mobility systems with the public transport network in an urban area, thus making possible a new intermodal system. The intermodal dispatcher makes use of a prior dispatcher, developed exclusively for conventional ride pooling systems and a method that filters out the requests that have few possibilities of being served using the public transport system, leaving them to be served directly by ride pooling vehicles. The assignments of customers to vehicles of the ride pooling system are finally determined by an integer programming model of reduced dimensions, so that it can be solved efficiently by conventional solvers as shown in the preliminary computational results included in the paper.

New sustainable mobility concepts and smart resilient ideas are arising every day. However, there is not an easy way to bring these ideas into reality, or to test how good they are as mobility solutions. Virtual Mobility Lab offers the opportunity to evaluate the impact of new mobility concepts before taking them to the real world. In this work, a multimodal macroscopic traffic simulation model of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area is developed, including both public and private transport network. This paper explains the remarkable features developed for this model, such as the network hierarchy and the multimodal public network interchangers, allowing demand to exchange between public transportation modes along their origin-destination paths.

Probe-based technologies are proliferating as a means of inferring traffic states. Technological companies are interested in traffic data for computing the best routes in a traffic-aware manner and they also provide real-time traffic information with certain temporal accuracy. This paper analyses and evaluates how data provided by a fleet of probe cars can be used to develop a navigation service and how the penetration rate of this service affects a set of city-scale KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and driver KPIs. The case study adopts a model-driven approach in which microscopic simulation emulates real-size fleets of probe vehicles that provide positions and speed data. What is noteworthy about the modelling behaviour is that drivers are segmented according to their knowledge of network conditions for selected trips: experts, regular drivers, and tourists. The paper presents and discusses the modelling approach and the results obtained from an experimental Barcelona CBD model designed to evaluate the penetration rates of probe vehicles and route guidance. An analysis of the simulation experiments reveals remarkable links among city-scale KPIs, which—from a multivariate point of view—is a novelty. A simulation-based framework for results analysis and visualization is also introduced in order to simplify the simulation results analysis and easily visualize OD paths for driver segments.

Probe vehicle (or connected car) data are becoming an important source of real-time travel information for a variety of intelligent transportation system applications. Since traditional sensors have significant installation and maintenance costs, technological companies are interested in traffic data from these alternative detection techniques for computing traffic-aware shortest routes. This paper analyzes and evaluates the use of data provided by probe vehicles in two reactive navigation strategies and how this affects a set of city and driver key performance indicators. The case study adopts a microscopic simulation approach to emulate real-size fleets of probe cars providing positions and speed data. The paper presents and discusses the modeling approach and the obtained results after conducting an experimental design for a Barcelona district scenario. Moreover, a simulation-based framework is introduced for simplifying the analysis of simulation results and easily visualizing origin-destination paths for the proposed driver segments (experts, regular, and tourists).

The CitScale tool is a software platform for visualizing, analyzing and comparing the impacts of new mobility concepts in urban models with special emphasis on new automotive vehicles or those based on innovative mobility concepts aimed at reducing environmental impacts. CitScale is simulation software agnostic. Using traffic simulation techniques requires executing multiple independent replications for each scenario in an experimental design, and each replication generates a huge amount of data that is not easy to analyze or compare. The analysis and comparison of experiments and scenarios is based on global, link-based and path-based key performance indicators from the perspective of users and mobility authorities while covering the scope of driver-type and transport mode.