ABSTRACT
The TRansportation ANalysis and SIMulation System (TRANSIMS) project at Los Alamos National Laboratory attempts to model all aspects of human behavior related to transportation in one consistent simulation framework. The key to the TRANSIMS design is a radically microscopic simulation of the travelers. The idea behind the TRANSIMS approach is that it simulates individual travelers. The geographical and demographic information of the synthetic individuals is then used to generate activities for them. Activities at different locations need to be connected by transportation. All agents' plans are executed simultaneously in a transportation micro-simulation. An agent-based simulation approach to transportation is possible with current technology, although it is still a significant computational challenge, especially when one strives for a realistic representation of the outside world. The computational challenge stems from the necessity to simulate realistic second-by-second driving of metropolitan regions with many millions of travelers.
