Project Meeting 2022.02.02

Agenda

Vehicle type model implementation update

• Will have one input file that contains the vehicle information by year.
  • input file will have the year of the vehicles and the age compared to the scenario year will be calculated on the fly based on a scenario year constant

Discussion on how to implement vehicle availability model, there are a couple of options:

1. Run after mode choice to allocate a model to a tour.
   • Implementation is simple and run time is low, but auto operating costs and other vehicle characteristics would not be included in mode choice.
2. Run before mode choice (after tour frequency and before destination choice) to allocate a vehicle for each occupancy level
   • Vehicle availability will run once for each occupancy level (sov, sr2, sr3p) to get the auto operating costs into the mode choice model.
   • If a driving mode is selected in mode choice, the accompanying vehicle will be selected.
   • extending the model to include AVs might also influence other characteristics (parking cost, in vehicle time, etc)
3. Run before mode choice and run for each occupancy level for each destination alternative in destination choice
   • There is a distance term in the vehicle availability model that prohibits electric vehicles on tours that are longer than the vehicle range. If we want this to influence destination choice, the availability model must select whether an electric vehicle was used.
   • Discussion disliked the additional runtime and complexity of this option. Can remove the distance term.

Moving forward with implementation option 2 above

• Additional questions
  • Can mode choice be run without this vehicle availibility model? Yes, would just need to specify the auto operating costs. Just like how it works right now without the model implemented
  • Is the model consistent between household members? No - it is possible to, e.g., have two different drive alone tours at the same time from two household members even if there is only one vehicle owned by the household.

Admin

• Trademark of ActivitySim is hopefully nearing completion
• Suggest that there is more partner involvement in testing and software evaluation
• Suggest that there might be smaller groups focus on specific tasks. Hope that this would increase partner engagement and improve documentation and overall quality of the product