Simulating the Resilience of Transport Infrastructures Using QUANT

We have developed a model that simulates the pattern of land use and transportation for Great Britain which is configured in terms of thousands of small zones and three modes of transport which bind together employment at place of work and population at place of residence. The model is called QUANT and it runs in a web-based environment. It is optimised to run very rapidly and deliver results to the user in a matter of minutes so that users can derive and test future scenarios for land use and transport, on-the-fly so-to-speak. Our preliminary explorations of the model using the DAFNI model platform suggest that we can adapt part of the model to this platform and this project presents a proof of concept that this is possible and useful. We will adapt the 'what-if' scenario capability of QUANT to the platform so that users can run thousands of scenarios whose data can be used to train various optimisation models that show how future plans for the location of land uses and transport can be massively improved. The model predicts the impacts of such scenarios and we will fashion various user environments around the use of DAFNI that enable stakeholders to test various plans and to demonstrate how AI techniques can be used to inform the generation of many scenarios. We will demonstrate how models such as these can be used effectively to generate the impacts of shocks to the land use transport system such as those posed by new infrastructure projects such as HS2 which are continually being evolved. The fact that our model deals with different transport networks for Great Britain enables us to trace the repercussions of land use and transport change across networks that are composed of thousands of nodes and links which is key to assessing the repercussions of major changes on the UK's urban system.