Show Case: SBB

The Passenger Division at the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) started building a MATSim model of all of Switzerland back in 2017. Since then, MATSim builds the main framework for SIMBA MOBi, the activity and agent-based transport model at SBB.

Nowadays, SIMBA MOBi, and with it MATSim, are well-established at SBB and help the company’s decision-making process in passenger demand planning. The model contributes forecasts and supports decisions of planners and managers inside of the company and outside. To replicate all travel door to door in Switzerland, a large number of available ground truth data is used to calibrate and validate the simulations.

From very early in the development stage of the model SBB has committed itself to contributing actively to the further development of MATSim. It developed the very fast transit router SwissRailRaptor which has since been contributed to the core of MATSim and become the default transit router in MATSim. Additional functionality from SBB is available in a separate contrib sbb-extensions, for example a deterministic public transport simulation or packages to calculate a number of transit-related key performance indices (KPIs) from MATSim simulations.

Since 2023, a second division at SBB also uses MATSim to model operational aspects of railway operations and created the railsim extension, again open-sourcing the internally developed functionality.

To let others learn from its own experiences and code, SBB’s Passenger Division publishes all MATSim-related code of SIMBA MOBI at GitHub.

To learn more about how SBB uses MATSim and deals with its open source aspects, watch the presentation of SBB about MATSim at FOSDEM’24.