Towards truly agent-based traffic and mobility simulations

Traveling is necessary and desirable; yet, it imposes external costs on other people. Quantitative methods help finding a balance. Multi-agent simulations seem an obvious possibility here. A real world traffic simulation consists of many modules, all requiring different expertise. The paper discusses how such modules can be coupled to a complete simulation system, how such a system can be made fast enough to deal with real-world sizes (several millions of travelers), and how agent memory can be introduced. A real-world case study is presented, which says that multi-agent methods for traffic are mature enough to be used alongside existing methods. Finally, some outlook into the near future is given.