Assessing the Use of Public Transportation System in Qazvin City Using a Simulator Model

Geospatial Information Systems has developed their applications in varioua area of science. The reason for this development is that Geospatial Information Systems are based on spatial data while nowadays spatila data is a major porion of information. One of the areas of wide use of Geospatila Information Systenms is Transportation and Traffic. It is obvious that Transportation and Traffic is dependent on Geospatial Information. In this paper the public multi-modal transportation in the city is studied. In cities, people may use private vehicles (such as automobile or motorbike) or public vehicles (such as bus, subway, etc). The city managers always aim to engage people to use public transportation system because extensive use of private vehicles can lead to various problems such as air pollution, noise, increasing fule consumption etc. Public transport only runs on a certain route and so many travels within the city needs use of more than one public vehicle. Thus, a traveler in a city may be obliged to use several and probably dissimailar public vehicles. He/she may also traverse a short path on his/her feet. In this situation we are facing a multi-modal transportation problem on a spation framework which can be solve by multiple methods considering various criteria. Such a problem has a good research background. However, in Iran, especially in Qavin city (the case of this study) such a system does not exist.

In this study the agen-based modeling is applied to simulate the travels of people in the city by public transportation system. The environment is the map of street network of Qazvin city which the routes of public transportation system have layed on it. The public transportation system in Qazvin city includes taxies and buses plus telephon taxi agencies. In this mode, the agents play the role of the travellers who travel from a specific point to another specific point in the city and have various options of using transportation system. The agent is able to use all of the options of travel and calculate the duration and the cost of each one to determine the mos desirable option.

The results revealed that public transportation system of Qazvin city have various desirability in its various routes. Thus, it is etter to estimate the desirailty of each route separately. However, generally speaking, we can argue that in the short travels, taxi is a good option, in mean travels the bus is affordable and for long travels using telephone taxies may be convinving. Nowadays, internet taxies are widely used. Internet taxies may be considered similar to telephone taxies. The difference between internet taxies and telephone taxis is that internet taxies are usually more abundant and also chepaer than telephone taxies.

Deployment of agent-based model as a simulator model creates a lot of power to analyze the problems of transportation system and traffic. This study proved this claim. The results of this study provide a general view of the cost and speed of public transportation system of Qazvin city while any traveller may have his/her specific idea. For instance, some people may choose the bus for their travel because of their own economical or security reasons. Nevertheless, the model developed in this study is able to evaluate the desirability of each travel based on not only cost and time but based on the other citeria if the data is available. Therefore, the power of the model is revealed when it is implemented on a public online or mobile application.