Agent-Based Simulation Testbed For On-Demand Mobility Services

New markets for personalized and efficient transport are creating a need for on-demand mobility services. To rigorously analyse new control mechanisms for these services, we introduce an open-source agent-based simulation testbed that allows users to evaluate the performance of multi-agent, on-demand transport schemes. In particular, our testbed provides a framework to compare both centralized and decentralized, static and dynamic passenger allocation and vehicle routing mechanisms under various conditions; including varying vehicle fleets, road network topologies and passenger demands. Our testbed supports all stages of the experimental process; from the implementation of control mechanisms and the definition of experiment scenarios, through to simulation execution, analysis, and interpretation of results. Ultimately, the testbed accelerates the development of control mechanisms for emerging on-demand mobility services and facilitates their comparison using well-defined benchmarks. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.