Movement of People and Goods

Due to the continuous growth of traffic and transportation and thus an increased urgency to analyze resource usage and system behavior, the use of computer simulation within this area has become more frequent and acceptable. This chapter presents an overview of modeling and simulation of traffic and transport systems and focuses in particular on the imitation of social behavior and individual decision-making in these systems. We distinguish between transport and traffic. Transport is an activity where goods or people are moved between points A and B, while traffic is referred to as the collection of several transports in a common network such as a road network. We investigate to what extent and how the social characteristics of the users of these different traffic and transport systems are reflected in the simulation models and software. Moreover, we highlight some trends and current issues within this field and provide further reading advice.