Integrated transportation and energy activity-based model

There is a long history of projects and regulations that have had limited or even counterproductive results. These unforeseen effects are due to the failure of planners to capture all of the complexity inherent in urban dynamics. With the increasing risks of global warming, policymakers and planners need to make optimal or close-to-optimal decisions on how to use the available resources in order to reduce energy and fuel consumption. This thesis develops the framework for an urban model that serves as a decision support tool to inform sustainable policies and investments. The model discussed integrates the modeling of land use, transportation, and energy consumption by micro-simulating the behavior of households and firms in an urban area. This approach derives transport and energy consumption from human activities and includes the two-way feedback between each agent's behavior and the area's overall dynamics. We build upon complex systems theory and make an analogy with epidemiology modeling to derive the properties of heterogeneity-based, organized complex systems. We then translate the properties of these models with respect to the spatial and temporal resolutions of transportation, land market and energy systems' models. To achieve the integration of the three complex systems with activities in our framework, we present three different extensions to activity-based modeling in the household context.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Ghauche, Anwar

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Moshe Ben-Akiva and P. Christopher Zegras.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58185

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/58185