VACANCY INTERNSHIP PROJECT We are looking for students interested in carrying out their internship project at DAT.Mobility
Implementation of Mobility Hubs in an agent-based destination choice model Problem description Cities around the world are currently facing inner city densification programs which will lead to system leaps regarding mobility. For example car usage will strongly decrease and other types of modes such as public transport, cycling and/or walking will increase. A change in car usage can be forced for example by a reduction of the parking norms (the ratio of number of parking places per house) or by parking facilities further away instead in front of the house. Mobility Hubs allow for spatial (inner city) compaction while maintaining (urban) accessibility. We want to gain experience with quantifying the impact of Mobility Hubs on the urban mobility using strategic transport models. Recently, DAT.Mobility has added the agent based travel demand model BRUTUS to OmniTRANS transport planning software (see https://tinyurl.com/y96m54kp , https://www.mobilitymodeling.com/brutus/ and https://www.dat.nl/omnitrans/ for more info). This model describes the number of trip chains along with their destinations and modes for all persons and households within the study area. Also the specific traffic behavior of target groups can be modelled separately. The BRUTUS model is therefore perfectly suited to model and analyze Mobility Hub concepts.
Internship / Master thesis assignment The goal of this research is to implement and analyze various Mobility Hub scenarios in the agent based travel demand model BRUTUS. Special attention thereby is needed for the impact on specific target groups. Therefore, a literature research into modelling specific constraints (e.g. parking constraints) within agent-based travel demand models should be conducted to complete the overview of possible solution methods, possibly supplemented by your own ideas or methods. Furthermore, the student should get acquainted with the current BRUTUS implementation. After the literature research, one or some of the different solutions should be implemented and tested, bearing in mind that data requirements of both estimation and application context, scalability and calculation time are the most important selection criteria. The concepts of Mobility Hubs should be tested in showcases by making use of an actual model system (e.g. the city of Utrecht or Almere). The results of the showcases should be compared with each other and also include sensitivity analysis. Interpretation of the outcomes is an important part of this study. As BRUTUS is programmed in R, a good environment for prototyping is available, allowing to directly see the effect of changes to the implementation.
Research group DAT.Mobility Deventer Daily supervisor: Ir. Klaas Friso (DAT.Mobility) When interested in this Internship or Masters thesis assignment on the implementation of Mobility Hubs in an agent based choice model, please contact Ir. Klaas Friso (kfriso@dat.nl, +31 (06) 11519996)