One of the major critiques of land use-transport interaction (LUTI) models over the ages has been their over-dependence on individualized software and context. In an effort to address some of these concerns, this study proposes a framework to construct "virtual cities" that can act as sandboxes for testing different features of a LUTI model, as well as provide the capability to compare different LUTI models. We develop an approach to translate any prototypical transportation infrastructure network into a plausible land use zoning plan and synthetic population that are suitable for spatially detailed LUTI microsimulation of the virtual city. Disaggregate units of spatial geometry, like parcels and post codes, are generated using geospatial techniques applied to the transportation network. Households and jobs are randomly sampled from an actual city, and allocated in the virtual city based on matching density gradients. Students are matched with schools and workers are matched with jobs to complete the calibration of a synthetic population for the virtual city. Following the adjustment of behavioral models to complement the reduced scale of the virtual city, we demonstrate the integration between the land use and transportation simulation components in our LUTI model, SimMobility. The benefits of faster convergence times and shorter simulation times are clearly demonstrated through this exercise. We hope that this study, and the open-source releases of the SimMobility software with the virtual city database, can accelerate experimentation with LUTI models and aid the transition from individualized LUTI models to a common shared integrated urban modeling platform.

中文翻译：

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生成虚拟城市作为土地利用-交通交互模型沙箱的框架

长期以来，对土地利用-运输交互 (LUTI) 模型的主要批评之一是它们过度依赖个性化软件和环境。为了解决其中的一些问题，本研究提出了一个构建“虚拟城市”的框架，该框架可以充当测试 LUTI 模型不同特征的沙箱，并提供比较不同 LUTI 模型的能力。我们开发了一种方法，将任何原型交通基础设施网络转化为合理的土地使用分区计划和合成人口，适用于虚拟城市的空间详细 LUTI 微观模拟。空间几何的分解单元，如地块和邮政编码，是使用应用于交通网络的地理空间技术生成的。家庭和工作是从实际城市中随机抽取的，并根据匹配的密度梯度分配到虚拟城市中。学生与学校匹配，工人与工作匹配，以完成虚拟城市合成人口的校准。在调整行为模型以补充缩小的虚拟城市规模之后，我们在我们的 LUTI 模型 SimMobility 中展示了土地利用和交通模拟组件之间的集成。本练习清楚地展示了更快收敛时间和更短仿真时间的好处。我们希望这项研究以及带有虚拟城市数据库的 SimMobility 软件的开源版本，