Abstract

International audience; Autonomous vehicles promise an important opportunity for a complete paradigm shift for the design of transportation systems. These systems will become more flexible and efficient by adapting to the travelers' demand. On the other hand, multi agent systems offer an intuitive and powerful way to design complex distributed systems and agent based simulation has proved to be well suited for studying the performance of mobility services and their impact on the users and the traffic in general. In this study, we use an Agent-Based modeling approach to design a mobility system based on a fleet of autonomous vehicles (robo-taxis and shuttles) and connected road side units, each of these elements represented by intelligent collaborative agents. In our model, the control is distributed among the agents and the global behaviour of the system emerges from local decisions. We then used a microsimulation tool to test the model on the real road network of the Paris-Saclay area. Since this area is planned to become a center for technology, innovation and education and is currently under constant development, it offers an opportunity for the design and the implementation of new models of transportation services. We designed our mobility system in an incremental manner by introducing more components and more intelligent behaviour and testing its performance at each step. Our results suggest that for our area of study, a mobility service that relies on autonomous vehicles aided by connected road side units that allow to retrieve information about the traffic would perform better than a regular service.

Abstract

The turnaround process constitutes an important part of the air transportation system. Airports often represent bottlenecks in air traffic management (ATM), thus operations related to the preparation of the aircraft for the next flight leg have to be executed smoothly and in a timely manner. The ATM significantly depends on a reliable turnaround process. Future paradigm changes with respect to airplane energy sources, aircraft design or propulsion concepts will also influence the airport layout. As a consequence, operational processes associated with the turnaround will be affected. Airlines aim for efficient and timely turnaround operations that are correlated with higher profits. This case study discusses an approach to investigate a new aircraft design with respect to the implications on the turnaround. The boarding process, as part of the turnaround, serves as an example to evaluate the consequences of new design concepts. This study is part of an interdisciplinary research to investigate future energy, propulsion and designs concepts and their implications on the whole ATM system. Due to these new concepts, several processes of the turnaround will be affected. For example, new energy storage concepts will influence the fueling process on the aircraft itself or might lead to a new infrastructure at the airport. This paper aims to evaluate the applied methodology in the case of a new boarding process, due to a new aircraft design, by means of a generic example. An agent-based boarding simulation is applied to assess passenger behavior during boarding, particularly with regard to cabin layout and seat configuration. The results of the generic boarding simulation are integrated into a simplified, deterministic and generic simulation of the turnaround process. This was done to assess the proposed framework for future investigations which on the one hand address the ATM system holistically and on the other, incorporate additional or adapted processes of the turnaround. Document type: Article