Location Choice Modeling for Shopping and Leisure Activities with MATSim

The activity-based multiagent simulation toolkit MATSim adopts a coevolutionary approach to capturing the patterns of people's activity scheduling and participation behavior at a high level of detail. Until now, the search space of the MATSim system was formed by every agent's route and time choice. This paper focuses on the crucial computational issues that have to be addressed when the system is being extended to include location choice. This results in an enormous search space that would be impossible to explore exhaustively within a reasonable time. With the use of a large-scale scenario, it is shown that the system rapidly converges toward a system's fixed point if the agents’ choices are per iteration confined to local steps. This approach was inspired by local search methods in numerical optimization. The study shows that the approach can be incorporated easily and consistently into MATSim by using Hägerstrand's time–geographic approach. This paper additionally presents a first approach to improving the behavioral realism of the MATSim location choice module. A singly constrained model is created; it introduces competition for slots on the activity infrastructure, where the actual load is coupled with time-dependent capacity restraints for every activity location and is incorporated explicitly into the agent's location choice process. As expected, this constrained model reduces the number of implausibly overcrowded activity locations. To the authors’ knowledge, incorporating competition in the activity infrastructure has received only marginal attention in multiagent simulations to date, and thus, this contribution is also meant to raise the issue by presenting this new model.