Welcome to the website of the research project Complexity in Public Transport (ComPuTr). This NWO sponsored research project studies the complexity of passenger behavior in public transport, specifically in Disruption Management and Revenue management.
On this website you can find all information about this NWO project. News & Events will tell you all about the latest developments in the ComPuTr project, upcoming events and past events like the kick off day in Rotterdam on September 6th, 2011. A general introduction to the , the partners and the project team can be found at About ComPuTr.
The ComPuTr project contains two PhD projects. Evelien van der Hurk‘s PhD project focusses on passenger behavior and Disruption Management. The research on Revenue Management and passenger behavior is lead by PhD candidate Paul Bouman. More indepth information about these projects can be found through the respective links.
We hope you enjoy your stay on our website. If you have any remarks or questions or would like to know more about the project, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
After doing a lot of research during the last year, we organized a meeting to communicate our progress to interested employees of Dutch Railways (NS). A lot of people showed up and we wish to thank all of them again for their interest! We enjoyed the afternoon very much and had great discussions with many of the participants.
Check out the presentations at our Event Page!
We have been rather busy recently! Evelien is preparing her presentation that she will give at the Conference on Advanced Systems for Public Transport (CASPT), where she will present the paper “Dynamic Forecast Model of Time Dependent Passenger Flows for Disruption Management“. In this paper, an algorithm which aggregates passenger flows based on their location while taking the location of the disruption in account, is presented. Applying this algorithm to smart card data, short term forecasts of passenger flows are generated. Knowledge on passenger flows enables disruption management to focus on passenger service level and hence leads to improving this service level.
Paul visited the MATSim tutorial and user meeting in Berlin, where he learned more about the MATSim software. Additionally, a number of interesting applications were presented. Furthermore, he has been busy working on the paper he will present at the Workshop on Agents in Traffic and Transportation, held at AAMAS 2012 on June 5th, in Valencia, Spain. The paper is called “Recognizing Demand Patterns from Smart Card Data for Agent-Based Micro-simulation of Public Transport” and discusses how we can derive an agent-population from smart card data, focusing on temporal preferences of the agents.
Finally, we added a video of the poster pitch presentation, given by Leo Kroon at the KNAW day on ‘Understanding and managing complex systems’ to the new video section of our site.
From 19 to 23 december 2012 NWO organized a winterschool for all its Complexity-project participants. During this week PhD students with different backgrounds, from biology to psychology to physics, were introduced to the theory of complexity.
Main lecturers Dan Braha and Hiroki Sayama spoke about complex networks, agent based modeling, game theory and non linear dynamics among many other topics. Presentations focused on the application of complexity theory were given by Kees Stam, Rob de Boer and Peter Nijkamp, among others.
As part of the NWO winterschool participants in groups of three specifically chosen for their diverse background wrote a short paper on a complexity topic of their choice. As reviews came in, many papers were a promising start for a paper that has a good chance of being publishes.
The group of Paul, Sanja and Marco wrote a paper on modularity and innovation. They find by simulating a random and a lattice network for decision interaction that the effectiveness of modularity in the decision making of firms strongly depends on the way the decisions interact. By studying multiple different networks through simulation, they showed that modularity is beneficial if the decisions interact with the structure of a lattice network, while this is not the case for random networks.
Wouter, Jos and Evelien focused on the effect of limited information on forecasting of market prices. They introduced a network structure that determined the communication between virtual participants to a heterogeneous forecasting model. Studying different network topologies they find that the average degree of a network influences the ability for the best forecasting strategy to spread through the network. Their paper can be found here.
The winning paper, on the effect of limited information on the topology of a network, presented their results at the KNAW day on ‘Understanding and managing complex systems’. Moreover, it was a great opportunity for participants to meet again and be reminded of all the great topics that are around in complexity research. You can watch the poster pitch presentation as given by Leo Kroon on Vimeo.
Link to the winterschool webpage
Link to the KNAW-day webpage
Today, we officially launched the ComPuTr website. We can hardly wait for the moment Google’s search results for ‘complexity in public transport’ will include computr.eu. For now, Google will just present you with the announcement of our kick-off day. A pity, because computr.eu has all information about this day available for you here – including presentations, reports and pictures.
We hope you will become a regular visitor of computr.eu. You can keep track of our latest news through your favorite channel from the sidebar. Please feel free to browse the content of the website to learn more about the Complexity in Public Transport project.
Thank you for your visit!
Paul and Evelien
