Is MATSim useful tool for Taxi fleet simulation?

Question

I am working on a university project and I seek some advice:

My project consists in modeling the taxi fleet of a major city and investigating if replacing a percentage of the fleet with electric vehicles would make the taxi driver adapt their driving habits. Secondly, I would like to get valuable data of where to set up charging devices for taxis exclusively throughout the city.

My plan was to model it with MATSim, a multi agent traffic simulation software.

The research is based on a big amount of GPS data from 100 taxis over a time period of almost a year. So far, I have analyzed the data with Matlab and I will be able to export agent plans soon. In this case, I am modeling every taxi driver as an agent. I am not introducing a new mode „taxi“ because I can’t model the demand. But as I was working, I realized that maybe MATSim is not even suitable and now I am questioning my plan.

Do you think MATSim will be suitable?

Answer 1

The MATSim mailing list has some answers to this question, see http://sourceforge.net/p/matsim/mailman/message/32265946/. From my point of view, MATSim is definitely a possible tool to do what you plan. But: you'll very likely have to write some custom analysis code.

Given the fact that you already (or soon will) have agents plans, you can simulate them on the network. Then, you could start doing analysis where a lot of taxis are, what typical distances are, etc. and identify where spots for charing stations would be (this, you need to do somehow yourself).

You only write "would make the taxi driver adapt their driving habits". Well, what would you expect, how they change their habits? You could implement some custom taxi-replanning module which takes into account where they try to pick up people, how long they make breaks in order to charge their vehicles, etc. Your question is rather generic on this topic, so it's hard to give a concrete answer. But in general, similar things have been simulated with MATSim, so it should definitely be possible.

If you plan to go ahead, it might be best to ask further and more specific questions on the users mailing list (http://www.matsim.org/mailinglists) on how to achieve specific things.