Policy and incentive designs evaluation: A social-oriented framework for Artificial Transportation Systems

In traffic & transportation system analysis the way individuals make choices plays a paramount role as these will affect the general efficiency with which people can travel. Modifications on the system by means of policy intervention affect commuters´ perspective impacting on the performance of the network and eventually on the society´s welfare. The emergence of system´s behaviour, as a result of decisions at individual level, provides the traffic manager with the opportunity to evaluate modifications that have been implemented on the system. However, there has been a slow advance in appropriately representing users and their behaviour in all social dimensions of intelligent transportation systems. This paper discusses on a social-oriented modelling & simulation framework for Artificial Transportation Systems, which accounts for different social dimensions of the system in the assessment and application of policy procedures. We illustrate how a social agent-based model can be a useful tool to test the appropriateness and efficiency of transportation policies.