USING SIMULATION AS AN ADVANCED TESTING METHOD : A study to improve a transportation service of an event-based system.

Abstract: Today in a modern society the pace is high and the need for flexibility and mobilityis big. Despite the increasing access and great digital solutions for online-meetings,the need for short distance transportation remains. With an increasing number ofeasy-to-use mobile applications, the many offered solutions for personal transporta-tion have in the last few years expanded. Besides the effect of an increasing pressureof road space, the pressure on the transportation solutions has escalated. This is the current situation of the company we came in contact with. Their currenttravel service provides on-demand transportation in small electric, emission free andchauffeur driven vehicles they call pods. As a step of claiming their space in thetransportation sector they are developing their application letting customers planand book a transport. For the ability to test their new booking solution this project took form. With asimulation it would be possible to test the various probabilities of a travel outcome.The aim was to develop a simulation software, simulating the events of multipletravels taking place in the system. With the simulation it would be possible to eval-uate the configuration for the booking feature, analyse how it works with the rest ofthe system and to help the company to predict how the intensity of customers in re-lations to the number of available drivers would affect the outcome of a travel request. The project covered the study of how to interpret the factors, that a transportationdirectly depends on, into events in the system and how to use historical events tocreate probabilities of the simulation outcome. The simulator software was not suc-cessful with simulating multiple rides as intended, but parts of the software could beevaluated in relation to historical events. Statistical models were built using aggre-gated events from the system. When comparing the average result of the statisticalmodels with the historical event count of the system, it resulted in an outcomewithin an acceptable range. This shows that it was possible to use aggregated his-torical events to create probabilities and that these probabilities were reliable.