Studying emergence of clusters in a bus passengers seating preference model

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2008

Subject Area

mode - bus

Keywords

Transit buses, Simulation, Seats, Seating, Passengers, Intelligent agents, Ethnic groups, Decision making, Consumers' preferences, Consumer preferences, Computer simulation, Cluster analysis, Autonomous agents, Aggregation, Age groups

Abstract

We present an agent-based model of a public bus where some passengers board and exit at every stop. Agents are the passengers characterized by their ethnicity, age group and cultural backgrounds and respective preferences for seats in the bus. Different scenarios are setup whereby the bus moves in various parts of the city, which may be segregated residentially, university campuses, and areas of mixed backgrounds. Emergence of clusters maybe observed as passenger agents make decisions and adapt their strategies. Measures for such emergent clusters are applied on a set of scenarios. Utilization of the bus seats are also studied from the simulated experiments. The current model is scalable to many buses running in the city. Moreover, as the next step, human intervention would be possible where human agents queued along with the software agents could make their own choices for the seats in the bus.

Comments

Transportation Research Part C Home Page: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

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