An Integrated Pipeline Architecture for Modeling Urban Land Use, Travel Demand, and Traffic Assignment

Abstract

Integrating land use, travel demand, and traffic models represents a gold standard for regional planning, but is rarely achieved in a meaningful way, especially at the scale of disaggregate data. In this report, we present a new pipeline architecture for integrated modeling of urban land use, travel demand, and traffic assignment. Our land use model, UrbanSim, is an open-source microsimulation platform used by metropolitan planning organizations worldwide for modeling the growth and development of cities over long (∼30 year) time horizons. Ur-banSim is particularly powerful as a scenario analysis tool, enabling planners to compare and contrast the impacts of different policy decisions on long term land use forecasts in a statistically rigorous way. Our travel demand model, Ac-tivitySim, is an agent-based modeling platform that produces synthetic origindestination travel demand data. Finally, we use a static user equilibrium traffic assignment model based on the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to assign vehicles to specific network paths to make trips between origins and destinations. This traffic assignment model runs in a high-performance computing environment. The resulting congested travel time data can then be fed back into UrbanSim and ActivitySim for the next model run. This technical report constitutes the FY18 Q1 deliverable for the U.S. Department of Energy SMART Mobility Urban Science Pillar task 2.2.2.2018: Coupling Land Use Models and Network Flow Models. It introduces this research area, describes this project's achievements so far in developing this integrated pipeline, and presents an upcoming research agenda.

Policy Modeling and Applications: State‐of‐the‐Art and Perspectives

“…Early models [73,74] focused on urban development, but those were readily followed by more general land-cover models [75,76]. Transportation and activities models also intensified their uses in the 2000s [77,78] and became paradigmatic for actual use in urban planning and transportation [79][80][81], especially by metropolitan bodies.…”

“…The belief for integrated planning shown in the 2011s [143] paper is still present in UrbanSim's most recent output [79]. Once more financed by an interested policy stakeholder, US Department of Energy, the authors propose an integrated "pipeline" among UrbanSim, called a microsimulation platform, along with ActivitySim, an agent-based model platform responsible for the generating traffic demand based on citizens choice of activities and a traffic assignment model (a routing mechanism).…”

Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) [Volume 2]

“…It has been argued that the challenges arising out of urbanization and climate change require a new, integrated approach to urban design, which ties together various disciplines and expertise that previously were only loosely connected in the design process (Gaffron et al 2005, Ahern 2013). An integrated approach entails the collaboration between different practices allowing for knowledge transfer between teams with the aim to increase the sustainability and resilience of urban form by cross-validating methods and knowledge as well as to increase the transparency and deliberation of the process (Gil and Duarte 2013, Tennøy et al 2016, Waddell et al 2018). However, the actual implementations of successful interdisciplinary processes and the integration of disciplines in urban design remain scarce and are considered gaps in research still to be addressed (Wilson 2018).…”

Development of an Integrated Transportation and Land Use Microsimulation Model on a Flexible Modeling Platform

“…However, few operational models account for the dynamic links between travel behavior and land use decisions. In one example, Waddell et al ( 20 ) describe recent work that combines the popular UrbanSim land use model with the ActivitySim travel demand model in an “integrated modeling pipeline,” using travel accessibility measures to affect decisions in the land use model. There is a need to implement more behavioral models that combine these kinds of long-term and short-term decisions within multi-level operational microsimulation frameworks to account for the complex behavior described above.…”

“…The integration of these modules, for example the exchange of data, has been achieved in several ways. For instance, the UrbanSim/ActivitySim integration is achieved through a loose coupling between models in which data outputs are serialized to be input to the next model ( 20 ). On the other hand, the POLARIS model was developed on a specialized software development kit to provide for interaction and data sharing among modules without serialization ( 18 ).…”