How do we evaluate societal impacts of an emerging transportation technology that does not have operational data yet? Nick Caros used a day-to-day agent simulation of both travelers’ and operators’ learning to evaluate the impacts of using modular autonomous vehicle fleets with en-route transfer capability under different operational settings to connect commuters between Dubai and Sharjah.

This was Nick’s MS thesis work with Next Future Transportation. He was funded by C2SMART, and Prof. Chow was partially supported by NSF EAGER CMMI-2022967. The published article can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1080/21680566.2020.1809549

As mobility shifts from single operators to platforms of multiple operators, there needs to be new techniques to analyze and design such systems. In this research with Ted and Saeid, we develop a new model framework and solution method to analyze MaaS ecosystems. It accounts for the incentives of operators to compete and work together to serve multimodal trips for travelers. As such, the model can be used to analyze the impacts of one operator’s capacity increase on other operators, identification of stable cost exchanges, between operators and travelers, firm entry/exit, changes in technology (like new matching algorithms) from one operator on the ecosystem, etc. When the number of operators simplifies to one, the model becomes a conventional capacitated multicommodity flow problem. The research was funded by NSF CMMI-1634973.

The paper can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trb.2020.08.002

Saeid is currently a Senior Research Engineer at Scoop Technologies while Ted is a Revenue Management Analyst at American Airlines.