Behavioral Calibration and Analysis of a Large-Scale Travel Microsimulation

This article reports on the calibration and analysis of a fully disaggregate (agent-based) transport simulation for the metropolitan area of Zurich. The agent-based simulation goes beyond traditional transport models in that it equilibrates not only route choice but all-day travel behavior, including departure time choice and mode choice. Previous work has shown that the application of a novel calibration technique that adjusts all choice dimensions at once from traffic counts yields cross-validation results that are competitive with any state-of-the-art four-step model. While the previous study aims at a methodological illustration of the calibration method, this work focuses on the real-world scenario, and it elaborates on the usefulness of the obtained results for further demand analysis purposes.