An Activity-based Carpooling Microsimulation Using Ontology

Abstract

This study aims to show an ability of Ontology, which is a formal explicit description of concepts in a domain of interest; in an activity-based microsimulation. Thus, an agent-based carpooling application using ontology techniques is presented as a case study with a focus on three functions of the Ontology. First, Ontology facilitates integrating between heterogeneous databases by defining the relationship between their concepts. Second, Ontology verities the compatibility and consistency between the different angles to combine varied models in a common structure by providing shared knowledge between different domains modelling with the definition of objects and concepts. Lastly, Ontology is useful for modelling agent communication by means of making explicit the parsed message between agents with the shared knowledge. This paper introduces related studies and basic knowledge about using methodologies, and supports an example of using Ontology in an agent-based carpooling simulation. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. ; The research leading tot these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement nr 270833