Agent - Based Modeling for Carpooling

Modeling activities and travel for individuals in order to estimate traffic demand leads to large scale simulations. Most current models simulate individuals acting in a mutually independent way except for the use of the shared transportation infrastructure. As soon as cooperation between autonomous individuals is accounted for, the individuals are linked to each other in a network structure and interact with their neighbours in the network while trying to achieve their own goals. In concrete traffic-related problems, those networks can grow very large. Optimization over such networks typically leads to combinatorially explosive problems. In this chapter, the case of providing optimal advice to combine carpooling candidates is considered. First, the advisor software structure is explained; then, the characteristics for the carpooling candidates network derived for Flanders (Belgium) are calculated in order to estimate the problem size.