Artois-Gohelle is a strategic modeling project developed exclusively with Aimsun Next. This project covers an area of about 750 km2 with a population of 600,000 inhabitants. The aim of the project was to create a model to study multimodal trips in the SMT Artois Gohelle area, particularly the bus rapid transit (BRT) service to Houdain, Bruay-la-Buissière, Béthune, Beuvry et Lens, Liévin and Hénin-Beaumont.

The network was imported from a GIS file and includes 300 transportation zones, over 100,000 sections and around 40,000 nodes. The total length covered by the network is 12,200 km.

The public transport network for the base and future variants was coded. The main objective of the project, once the four-step model was calibrated and validated against the base case, was to estimate the future case and evaluate a new and more user-friendly Public Transport Plan.

The four-step model includes Generation/Attraction, Distribution plus Modal Split, and Private and Public Transport Assignment. This strategic model follows an iterative procedure that allows recalculation of demand generation and traffic assignment using previously calculated costs as a base for future scenarios.