Iowa Commuter Transportation Study

During the 2014 legislative session, Senate File 2349 was passed which states the Iowa Department of Transportation “shall conduct a study to identify administrative needs, projected demand, necessary capital and operating costs, and public transit service structures including park-and-ride lots, employer or public van pool programs, and traditional fixed-route transit. The department shall submit a report with findings and recommendations to the general assembly on or before December 15, 2014.”

A BDI-based approach for the assessment of driver's decision-making in commuter scenarios

The rapid growth of urban areas has a significant impact on traffic and transportation systems. New management policies and planning strategies are clearly necessary to cope with the more than ever limited capacity of existing road networks. The concept of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) arises in this scenario; rather than attempting to increase road capacity by means of physical modifications to the infrastructure, the premise of ITS relies on the use of advanced communication and computer technologies to handle today’s traffic and transportation facilities. Influencing users’ behaviour patterns is a challenge that has stimulated much research in the ITS field, where human factors start gaining great importance to modelling, simulating, and assessing such an innovative approach. This work is aimed at using Multi-agent Systems (MAS) to represent the traffic and transportation systems in the light of the new performance measures brought about by ITS technologies. Agent features have good potentialities to represent those components of a system that are geographically and functionally distributed, such as most components in traffic and transportation. A BDI (beliefs, desires, and intentions) architecture is presented as an alternative to traditional models used to represent the driver behaviour within microscopic simulation allowing for an explicit representation of users’ mental states. Basic concepts of ITS and MAS are presented, as well as some application examples related to the subject. This has motivated the extension of an existing microscopic simulation framework to incorporate MAS features to enhance the representation of drivers. This way demand is generated from a population of agents as the result of their decisions on route and departure time, on a daily basis. The extended simulation model that now supports the interaction of BDI driver agents was effectively implemented, and different experiments were performed to test this approach in commuter scenarios. MAS provides a process-driven approach that fosters the easy construction of modular, robust, and scalable models, characteristics that lack in former result-driven approaches. Its abstraction premises allow for a closer association between the model and its practical implementation. Uncertainty and variability are addressed in a straightforward manner, as an easier representation of humanlike behaviours within the driver structure is provided by cognitive architectures, such as the BDI approach used in this work. This way MAS extends microscopic simulation of traffic to better address the complexity inherent in ITS technologies.

Impact assessment of the Virginia Railway Express Commuter Rail on land use development patterns in northern Virginia.

Federal Transit Administration, Washington, D.C.

Transportation contingency plans for future gas shortages will not meet commuter needs. Comptroller General's report to the Congress of the United States.

Mode of access: Internet.

Impact of commuter aliens along the Mexican and Canadian borders : hearings.

Hearings held in various cities Jan. 26-Mar. 8, 1968.

ITS Institutional and Legal Issues Program. Review of the Houston Smart Commuter operational test. Final report.

Transportation Department, Joint Program Office for Intelligent Transportation Systems, Washington, D.C.

Evaluation of rail rapid transit and express bus service in the urban commuter market. Final report.

Transportation Department, Office of Transportation Planning Analysis, Washington, D.C.

Crashworthiness analysis of commuter aircraft seats.

Federal Aviation Administration, Atlantic City International Airport, N.J.

IVHS institutional issues and case studies. Westchester commuter central case study. Final report.

Federal Highway Administration, Washington, D.C.

A preliminary study of commuter rail systems by analytical models and computer simulation.

"The results of a research project undertaken by the Department of Industrial Engineering and Administration of the Cornell University College of Engineering under a summer grant [1963] from the New York State Office of Transportation."

Evolution and operations of the Reston Virginia commuter bus service /

Final report, Oct. 1975 to March 1977; issued Aug. 1977.

Guidelines for the organization of commuter van programs /

Mode of access: Internet.

Employment center bus service guidelines for implementation : a new approach to commuter bus service /

Mode of access: Internet.