Benefits of Integrating Microscopic Land Use and Travel Demand Models: Location Choice, Time Use & Stability of Travel Behavior

Abstract

The land use/transport feedback cycle has been described since decades. The transport system provides travel times under congested conditions, which are used in land use models to assess the desirability of locations. Based on where people live and work, demand for travel is derived which leads to updated congestion, and hence, new travel times. There is a renewed interest in combined land use and travel demand models, as new trends, such as telework or driverless vehicles, are expected to have substantial influence on land use/transport interactions. Modeling the impact of such scenarios simply cannot afford to leave the land use forecast static and unaffected by changes of the transportation system. The research presented in this paper proposes a new way of integrating a land use model with a travel demand model. Traditionally, land use models provide location and employment information of the synthetic population for the travel demand model, and the transport system feeds back accessibilities as one of many location factors to the land use model. For improving the cause-and-effect correlation of travel demand and land use models an integrated approach is worthwhile. The project, however, will be the first to microscopically integrate these models at the agent level. Individual activity schedules will influence individual household relocation. Vice versa, changes of the housing location, location of work and school places and the likelihood to conduct telework will influence activity patterns for a household. Representing both systems in integrated land use/transport models results in more reasonable sensitivities than provided by models that represent only one domain. What has not been accomplished before is a microscopic integration of travel demand and land use models. Even projects that integrated microscopic land use models with activity-based models did not improve upon the integration step, but merely linked two microscopic models in a traditional way through accessibilities, and thereby, missing out on some of the opportunities offered by microsimulation. This project will integrate the two existing models SILO and mobiTopp. Both are agent-based models and work with synthetic populations that represent the agents microscopically. The microscopic integration will allow for a better representation on land use/transport interactions.