LLM-ABM for Transportation: Assessing the Potential of LLM Agents in System Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Tianming, Yang, Jirong, Yin, Yafeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Tianming
Yang, Jirong
Yin, Yafeng
author_facet Liu, Tianming
Yang, Jirong
Yin, Yafeng
contents Agent-based modeling approaches represent the state-of-art in modeling travel demand and transportation system dynamics and are valuable tools for transportation planning. However, established agent-based approaches in transportation rely on multi-hierarchical mathematical models to simulate travel behavior, which faces theoretical and practical limitations. The advent of large language models (LLM) provides a new opportunity to refine agent-based modeling in transportation. LLM agents, which have impressive reasoning and planning abilities, can serve as a proxy of human travelers and be integrated into the modeling framework. However, despite evidence of their behavioral soundness, no existing studies have assessed the impact and validity of LLM-agent-based simulations from a system perspective in transportation. This paper aims to address this issue by designing and integrating LLM agents with human-traveler-like characteristics into a simulation of a transportation system and assessing its performance based on existing benchmarks. Using the classical transportation setting of the morning commute, we find that not only do the agents exhibit fine behavioral soundness, but also produce system dynamics that align well with standard benchmarks. Our analysis first verifies the effectiveness and potential of LLM-agent-based modeling for transportation planning on the system level.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_22718
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-ABM for Transportation: Assessing the Potential of LLM Agents in System Analysis
Liu, Tianming
Yang, Jirong
Yin, Yafeng
Multiagent Systems
Agent-based modeling approaches represent the state-of-art in modeling travel demand and transportation system dynamics and are valuable tools for transportation planning. However, established agent-based approaches in transportation rely on multi-hierarchical mathematical models to simulate travel behavior, which faces theoretical and practical limitations. The advent of large language models (LLM) provides a new opportunity to refine agent-based modeling in transportation. LLM agents, which have impressive reasoning and planning abilities, can serve as a proxy of human travelers and be integrated into the modeling framework. However, despite evidence of their behavioral soundness, no existing studies have assessed the impact and validity of LLM-agent-based simulations from a system perspective in transportation. This paper aims to address this issue by designing and integrating LLM agents with human-traveler-like characteristics into a simulation of a transportation system and assessing its performance based on existing benchmarks. Using the classical transportation setting of the morning commute, we find that not only do the agents exhibit fine behavioral soundness, but also produce system dynamics that align well with standard benchmarks. Our analysis first verifies the effectiveness and potential of LLM-agent-based modeling for transportation planning on the system level.
title LLM-ABM for Transportation: Assessing the Potential of LLM Agents in System Analysis
topic Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22718