An Evaluation of Agent-Based Models for Simulating E-Scooter Sharing Services in Urban Areas

The electric scooter (e-scooter) is an increasingly popular transport mode in urban areas at global level. As an alternative form of shared micromobility in cities, e-scooter sharing systems were first introduced in the United States in 2017. Since then, they have spread in Europe, Asia, and Australia. In order to evaluate their sustainability performance, shared e-scooters should be simulated or/and measure their real-life impacts; however, a universal evaluation process for selecting a simulation platform does not exist. This study seeks to better understand the impacts of micromobility and simulation platforms for urban areas. To achieve this a two-stage evaluation process is performed. At first, the study reviews and analyzes the most common simulation models (i.e., traffic simulation and Agent-based Model (ABM) platforms). Seven ABM platforms are identified as suitable for simulating transportation modes. The seven identified ABM platforms are explored and evaluated based on a set of indicators representing four dimensions: 1) Functionality, 2) Capabilities, 3) Data, and 4) Operational Capacity. In the second-stage evaluation the seven ABM platforms are further evaluated for simulating micromobility against ten proposed criteria. The ABM platform Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit (MATSim) emerges as the most prevalent for simulating e-scooters in urban areas as it meets nine of the ten introduced criteria and it has the potential to be adapted effectively in the simulation of new innovative transport services.