Validation of transport infrastructure changes via microscopic simulation: A case study for the city of Samara, Russia

Transport infrastructure of cities faces big challenges when hosting major international sport events. At present within the context of the upcoming 2018 FIFA World Cup, municipal authorities are planning to build some new streets and modify road junctions in the city of Samara. The study aims to investigate the effect of these improvements on the transport situation in the city. To achieve this goal the agentbased simulation and analysis tools based on free software MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) were used. We have developed a framework for transforming available data into a form acceptable for the simulation system. A spatial distribution of trips via time frames was described as origin-destination (OD) matrices. The OD matrices were converted to destination chains by a special-purpose method of traffic flows distribution. We have run simulation for the whole city of Samara with its current road network to check the feasibility of the model to reflect the real transport situation. The model was used for checking the impact of building roads to the new stadium: Arena and Dalnaya streets. Using this model we detected possible problems and proposed the ways to omit them.