This paper presents an overview of an approach to address complexity issues and real-life engineering problems in large, urban transportation systems. In this context we discuss the fundamental problem of designing a metropolitan transportation system which is both efficient and controlable.

Large scale microscopic (i.e., vehicle-based) traffic simulations pose high demands on computational speed in at least two application areas: (i) real-time traffic forecasting, and (ii) long-term planning applications (where repeated 'looping" between the microsimulation and the simulated...

We use a very simple description of human driving behavior to simulate traffic. The regime of maximum vehicle flow in a closed system shows near-critical behavior, and as a result a sharp decrease of the predictability of travel time. Since Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMSs) tend to...

Traffic simulations are made more realistic by giving individual drivers intentions, i.e., an idea of where they want to go. One possible implementation of this idea is to give each driver an exact pre-computed path, that is, a sequence of roads this driver wants to follow. This paper shows, in...

We look at price formation in a retail setting, that is, companies set prices, and consumers either accept prices or go someplace else. In contrast to most other models in this context, we use a two-dimensional spatial structure for information transmission, that is, consumers can only learn...

Iterating between a router and a traffic micro-simulation is an increasibly accepted method for doing traffic assignment. This paper, after pointing out that the analytical theory of simulation-based assignment to-date is insufficient for some practical cases, presents results of simulation...

This paper shows how particle hopping models fit into the context of traffic flow theory, that is, it shows connections between fluid-dynamical traffic flow models, which derive from the Navier-Stokes-equation, and particle hopping models. In some cases, these connections are exact and have long...