Integrated multimodal network management: An agent based approach

Abstract

Future developments of mobility go strongly through a complementarity and blending of modes. From this point of view, the potential benefits (i.e. societal, monetary) of mobility management beyond modes is very interesting to study. Integrated multimodal traffic management refers to the coordination of individual network operations, to create an interconnected mobility management system. In many networks across the world there has been a considerable investment in communication and sensing technologies along major corridors of the network. An integrated multimodal traffic management system aims at exploiting the full potential of deployed intelligent transport technologies to improve not only the operation and performance of the network but also the demand travelling in the network, influence the mode choice, travel time, delay, fuel consumption and emissions. Moreover, it should increase the reliability and predictability of travel in the network. Commuters consider and plan their mobility comprehensively, they have access to multimodal information and routing (i.e. apps), and the same should hold in the infrastructure supply side (i.e. traffic network operators). Most trips use multiple modes of transport, including mobility services; future mobility management systems should consider inter-layer communication, and their complementarity and collaboration. Currently we are limited to lack of communication and/or collaboration between inter-modal infrastructures. Each operator makes decisions in- dependently, and thus, may negatively affect users’ mobility. For instance railway and road traffic optimize their performance separately, but an integrated framework could be beneficial. The complementarity of most transport modes (speed, accessibility capacity) is in fact ignored in most traffic control approaches. Essentially, modes are complementary, in terms of speed, accessibility, and capacity: while trains can achieve a high capacity for a restricted set of nodes (stations), cars can connect almost any two points; furthermore, in urban areas, active modes such as walking or cycling enable accessing (almost) all places. The Success of a multimodal traffic management system depends on careful planning on one hand, and on the other hand on an integrated system level perspective among the network operators, which calls for advanced transportation analysis tools to estimate and predict network performance under different strategies and analyze the network for different tactical purposes. Future traffic control beyond modes aims to study the benefits of a nation wide integrated multimodal traffic management system.