MOSAIIC: City-Level Agent-Based Traffic Simulation Adapted to Emergency Situations

Abstract

In this paper, we present MOSAIIC, an agent-based model to simulate the road traffic of a city in the context of a catastrophic event. Whether natural (cyclone, earthquake, flood) or human (industrial accident) in origin, catastrophic situations modify both infrastructures (buildings, road networks) and human behaviors, which can have a huge impact on human safety. Because the heterogeneities of human behaviors, of land-uses and of network topology have a great impact on the traffic flows, the agent-based modeling is particularly adapted to this subject. In this paper, we focus on the new traffic model itself: the way geographical data is used to build a network, the various behaviors of our agents, from the individual to the collective level. IntroductionNowadays, traffic simulations are often used by urban planners to make decisions concerning road infrastructures. Many models have been developed these last years. These models are grouped according to their levels of representation: macroscopic A modeling approach that is particularly well-fitted for micro-simulation is agent-based modeling. It allows to consider the heterogeneity of driver behaviors and to take into account the global impact of local processes.Such approach is increasingly used as many frameworks allowing urban planners to easily build their own scenarios (MATSIM [5], SUMO [6], AgentPolis [7]) are

Building, composing and experimenting complex spatial models with the GAMA platform

“…Another example is the MOSAIIC Model [24]. This model proposes a detailed representation of the driver operational behaviors at a low time scale (1 simulation step = 1 s).…”

A Multi-modal Urban Traffic Agent-Based Framework to Study Individual Response to Catastrophic Events

“…Indeed GAMA provides modelers a complete modeling language (GAML: GAma Modeling Language) and different features that can be used by modelers to develop traffic models [20]. It has already been used for several traffic models such as the ones proposed by [7,16].…”

“…While aforementioned frameworks make it possible to model regular urban traffic, most of them do not propose extended features to study the disruption induced by crisis events [7]. On the other hand, even if there are several agentbased models that study evacuation model, there is no dedicated framework to the best of our knowledge [11].…”

“…GAMA has been recently used to study evacuation and traffic under catastrophic event [7,1] as an alternative to Netlogo. The platform has several well suited features such as GIS native integration and simple and efficient primitives for car as well as pedestrian mobility over network and continuous topography.…”

“…However, most of the influential proposals in the domain focus on demand, supply and control of traffic transportation system [3]. While this covers almost all urban planners' concerns about problems such as how to design, maintain and expand traffic systems, they are not suitable for studying the outcomes of uncommon and/or extreme [11,7]. Indeed, mobility in a crisis context is radically different from mobility in a normal situation: individuals can change destination goals and/or modes of transport very quickly; they may adopt a specific attitude, for example nervousness, fear, impatience according to their mode of transportation; finally, the transport networks can themselves be affected either by the hazard directly (flood or earthquake) or indirectly (traffic lights interruption).…”