A Discrete Event Formalism for Fast Simulation of On-Demand Transportation Systems

The interconnection between intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and services poses fundamental challenges with respect to establishing most efficient structures as well as intelligent and integrated control strategies addressing new transportation paradigms such as autonomous vehicles, mobility-on-demand as well as the transportation electrification. Systematic and integrated methods for efficiently modeling, simulating and evaluating these systems are required, which are able to address aforementioned challenges. For this, we present a discrete event formalism for fast simulation of on-demand transportation systems, which provides a formalization of essential static properties, dynamic state functions, as well as events concisely describing transportation system design space in the scope of emerging transportation paradigms. Our formalism allows for reduction of computational complexity by defining domain-relevant events impacting the design problem at hand, while omitting unimportant states negatively impacting simulation performance and modeling effort. The formalism can serve as the foundation for deriving well-defined designs of transportation systems as well as locally and globally optimal control strategies.