10. Applications and Future Developments: Future Developments and Research Topics

This final chapter explores the potential of traffic assignment models for development, beyond traditional or advanced applications. The modeling of public transportation systems is a fertile terrain for research, especially as the digital era is seeing a proliferation of innovations: in the operation of existing systems and above all in the design of original, flexible, demand-responsive mobility services, which rely on different forms of resource pooling. The principle of pooling, fundamental in mass transit for the sharing of infrastructures by vehicles and the sharing of vehicles by passengers, has now found a very wide range of applications, thanks to the presence of information everywhere in the mobility system, which includes the transportation system and its users. The body of the chapter is structured into three sections. First, we consider the new deal in public urban passenger transport that stems from the new order in the field of information: Ongoing or future innovations pertain to the management of line networks, to the provision of more flexible intermediate services, and to the sharing of vehicles, drivers, and parking spaces, together with the potential associated with autonomous (automated self-driving) vehicles. Second, we identify a whole range of research topics on traffic assignment models and their inputs to their potential applications for system regulation, passing by (i) passenger behaviors and their statistical structures, (ii) the physics and control of traffic—both passengers and vehicles, (iii) the spatial features and their flow-oriented layout, and (iv) the organization and operations of specific travel modes. Third and last, we open up a broad perspective onto the relation between mobility systems and simulation models: Models are becoming more and more modular, and they constitute a toolbox that is more and more powerful; a number of tools are implemented to bring augmented reality to the transit systems for all of its stakeholders (users, operators, regulators, general public); arguably, an Urban Mobility Living Lab should be an ideal framework to study system conditions, to design user-oriented innovations, and to test system’s responses to them on the field.