Design and development of the ILUTE operational prototype: A comprehensive microsimulation model of urban systems

Transportation problems have exacted enormous economic, societal and environmental consequences in many urban areas over the past fifty years. While the public failure of transportation models in the 1970s led many planners to abandon their use, there has been renewed interest in recent years due to technological and methodological advances. The complex interconnection between transportation and the rest of the urban environment, however, necessitates an urban systems approach to transportation modelling.; ILUTE is a comprehensive dynamic microsimulation model of urban systems based on the “ideal model” described in the final report of the Transit Cooperative Research Program's (TCRP) Project H-12, “Integrated Urban Models for Simulation of Transit and Land-Use Policies”. The contributions made by this thesis include the design of overall ILUTE software, the resolution of critical design issues, and the development of an initial operational prototype.; Specific advances made in this thesis include an open design for collaborative development; fully-elaborated real-world classes; explicit representation of persons, households, and families; handling of multiple spatial aggregations; handling of joint decisions; handling of temporal leads and lags; a stressor-based decision-making mechanism; support for arbitrary time increments; integrated management of temporal data; and an improved technique for monetary handling. The operational prototype can synthesize a test set of objects; import external spatial, economic, and travel time data; evolve the state of the system to an arbitrary date using an arbitrary time step; track the behaviour of individual objects in the system; simulate population in and out migration; export spatiotemporal data for visualization in an animated 3D environment; and read and write state information to and from a relational database.; ILUTE has been designed to replace conventional models in the analysis of a broad range of transportation and urban policy issues. It can also serve as an important tool to help engineers and planners understand the interaction between the urban environment and the transportation system. ILUTE has the potential to transform our urban landscape and significantly enhance our economic, environmental, and societal well-being—a prospect that few other technologies can offer.