Adding Realism and Efficiency to Public Transportation in MATSim

The current simulation of public transportation in MATSim has several shortcomings regarding the simulation of railway transportation. This is mostly due to the fact that for the simulation of public transportation, the same data structures are used as for the simulation of private car traffic, while the desired level of detail of the modelling varies strongly. For example, while the road network is modelled in detail with intersections and sometimes even lanes, railway transportation is usually modelled on a more conceptual level with stops and connections, and not with rails and switches. The paper describes current shortcomings for modelling railway transportation in MATSim and takes a look at current work-arounds. Then, a new module is presented allowing the deterministic simulation of public transportation, solving many of the mentioned shortcomings. A second part will present a related work: A new alternative public transport router has been implemented for MATSim, which not only provides a more realistic public transport route choice behaviour by MATSim’s agents, but also increases efficiency in terms of computation time and memory usage. In a third part, results will be presented highlighting how the aforementioned changes (positively) affect the simulation of public transportation in MATSim.