INTRANET: A new simulation tool for intermodal transportation systems

摘要

The issues of modelling, simulation, and control of an intermodal urban transportation system are addressed in this paper. The transportation network is modelled as an oriented graph in which nodes represent single-mode stations or intermodal stations. For the system under consideration, a discrete event model integrating different transportation services is presented. Some disturbances are included to model the stochastic nature of the system. Based on such a model, a special-purpose urban traffic simulator has been designed, including two major modules. The first one, the Traffic Simulation Kernel, allows one to study the dynamic behaviour of the transportation system, analyzing its performance and applying control strategies for performance optimization. The second one, the Passenger Information Service, gives the system users, at any time, updated information about the different intermodal paths between any pair of origin/destination nodes. In this paper attention is focused on the functioning of the simulation module. Some experimental results relevant to a case study, showing the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies, are presented and discussed.