Real-time Analysis of City Scale Transportation Networks in New Orleans Metropolitan Area using an Agent Based Model Approach

¹ Department of Civil Engineering, University of California Berkeley, CA 94720
² Department of Civil Engineering, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom  

^* Corresponding author: mcelwee@berkeley.edu

Abstract

The primary focus of this research is to develop and implement an agent-based model (ABM) to analyze the New Orleans Metropolitan transportation network near real-time. ABMs have grown in popularity because of their ability to analyze multifaceted community scale resilience with hundreds of thousands of links and millions of agents. Road closures and reduction in capacities are examples of influences on the weights or removal of edges which can affect the travel time, speed, and route of agents in the transportation model. Recent advances in high-performance computing (HPC) have made modeling networks on the city scale much less computationally intensive. We introduce an open-source ABM which utilizes parallel distributed computing to enable faster convergence to large scale problems. We simulate 50,000 agents on the entire southeastern Louisiana road network and part of Mississippi as well. This demonstrates the capability to simulate both city and regional scale transportation networks near real time.