MaaS Blender: Integration of Mobility Simulators for Mobility as a Service Evaluation

With advances in information technology over the past decade, new mobility services have been developed and the concept of mobility as a service (MaaS) has become an achievable reality. There have been several attempts to implement MaaS, which is expected to be beneficial for users, practically. However, policy-makers have found estimating the effects of practical MaaS implementation challenging, as the integrated behavior of two or more mobility services is difficult to understand. In this study, we propose an event-based simulator integration mechanism to evaluate MaaS easily. The proposed mechanism attaches/detaches existing simulation models and/or mobility services via application programming interfaces (APIs). Moreover, it utilizes independent mechanisms to generate transportation demands and simulate user preferences. Two application scenarios are evaluated qualitatively, indicating that the proposed mechanism can successfully handle various scenarios such as private and small area MaaS and public and middle size area MaaS, and evaluate them from the viewpoints of transportation performance. The mechanism will improve user experience and service quality and enable realization and evaluation of practical MaaS.