Multi-Agent Simulation to Study Sustainable Travel Behaviors in Stockholm County

Sammanfattning:  In this master thesis, multiagent simulation was implemented with MATSim to study the change would take place on travel behaviors in Stockholm County when all residents travel in a sustainable way under a predefined emission limit. In this multiagent simulation, individual person was simulated as agent with attributes, daily travel plans and behaviors. The attributes contained home location, workplace locations, and some socioeconomic attributes, which were assigned according to the demographic data and travelling statistics data collected. Two trips, morning commuting from home to workplace and evening commuting from workplace to home, were simulated while the daily travel plans included travelling by car, public transit, bike and working at home. Each day, the person was set to select a travel plan based on socioeconomic attributes, his current greenhouse gas emission and a monthly emission limit. The selected plan was then executed and his emission was updated. In the model, a working population of 771614 people in Stockholm County was used and one month period with 21 working days was simulated. Totally four monthly emission limits were tested: 30kg, 37kg, 50kg, and infinity representing the current scenario. The research shows that multiagent simulation is effective in simulating individual travel behaviors. The results suggest that under current scenario car is the most frequently selected travel mode accounting for 32%, followed by public transit 31%. There are about 12% of people working at home and 25% travelling by bike. Nearly 1 percent fails to select a plan because of the plan selection setting. When emission limit is set, the percentage of people changing travel behaviors is 21.2%, 25.8% and 29.9% under the emission limit 50kg, 37kg and 30kg respectively. Most of them would abort from car and public transit to bike, public transit or even failing to keep their emission under the limit. The percentage of people changing plan to bike is 9.4%, 11.8%, 13.4% under the three limits 50kg, 37kg and 30kg respectively while the percentage of people changing plan to public transit or failure is 10.2%, 12.5% and 15.2%. The result also shows that when 37kg limit is set, the people having problems with keeping their emission under the limit are mainly distributed at three regions: Stockholm City, some cities in southwest and northeast of Stockholm County, where there would also be more demand for public transit service. The people changing plans to bike are mainly  distributed  in  Stockholm  City  area,  where  sustainable  travel  behavior  should  be promoted