Understanding urban mobility and the impact of public policies: The role of the agent-based models

This paper provides a critical review of research on Agent-Based Models (ABMs) focusing on urban mobility, dealing either with passengers or with freight transport. The work concentrates on urban areas where public policies aiming at improving the sustainability of city systems necessarily affect both passengers and freight dimensions. Traffic in towns is responsible for a high share of congestion and pollution and consequently, it contributes to the climate change problems. The following conclusions can be derived. ABMs present important advantages for analysing urban transport and its sustainability but more efforts are needed in order to test and improve their use. In the literature, there is still a gap in urban transport AB modelling. The number of developed models is limited and they are often applied in broader geographical areas than urban ones. Only some of the works includes the estimation of environmental impacts as a result of certain types of agents' behaviour. Despite their potential effectiveness to represent the impacts of different public policies on agent behaviour and on the environment, none of the ABMs have been implemented in the real word by the researchers and there is no evidence of application of any model by policy-makers.