The use of city models for supporting simulation-based scenario studies has become a regular practice throughout the world. These models, however, tend to focus on very few aspects (e.g. land-use, transportation) assuming an exogenous participation of other fundamental aspets (e.g. energy, communications). The problem is that a large number of relevant interactions become compromised or even absent at all. And this is even more important with current trends like electrical vehicles or realtime mobility information. For example, for studying future transport systems we need also to include energy supply dynamics. An important motivation for this apparent simplicity of current models has been that modelling a large number of urban sub-systems, or integrated modeling, is not only extremely complex to design but also computationally expensive. While these reasons have justified strong opposition to integrated models in the past (e.g. (Lee, 1973)), the current situation has changed radically, particularly in terms of computational power. More importantly, today we have a much more interconnected city than we had before, with ubiquitous systems, smart-grid, internet, etc. and it’s becoming forbidding to ignore such complexity in urban modeling itself. This paper introduces an integrated transportation and energy activity-based model (iTEAM), a tool for the evaluation of “green policies” aimed at enhancing sustainability and well-being. The model will simulate individual/household and organisation/firm agents at a micro level. The aggregate simulation results will help forecast the impacts of policies on transport system efficiency and land-use dynamics in the simulated areas. This process is complemented by Material Flow Accounting (MFA) techniques, which account for a range of factors including wellbeing, waste production, and carbon emissions to calculate the urban metabolism. This project is currently implemented at several levels. Data collection consists of a smartphone survey, home-based telemetering, an online survey, acquisition of National Census, and other official population databases. The modelling of individual agents (households, individuals, firms, developers) focuses on activity patterns and is implemented in the Open Platform for Urban Simulation, OPUS (Waddell et al, 2003). Work towards the integration of Material Flow Accounting (MFA) (Niza et al., 2009)) in this platform is also progressing. This paper presents the overall project, with focus on the modeling methodology, coming from Behavioural Econometrics, Transport Engineering and Urban Planning. We present the current status of the project and results reached so far.

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urban models, activity models, pervasive data processing

Esta comunicação está associada ao registo seguinte:

• The virtual city with real decisions: iTEAM