GATSim: Urban Mobility Simulation with Generative Agents

Abstract: Traditional agent-based urban mobility simulations rely on rigid rule-based systems that fail to capture the complexity, adaptability, and behavioral diversity characteristic of human travel decision-making. Recent advances in LLMs and AI agent technology offer opportunities to create agents with reasoning capabilities, persistent memory, and adaptive learning mechanisms. We propose GATSim (Generative-Agent Transport Simulation), a novel framework that leverages these advances to create generative agents with rich behavioral characteristics for urban mobility simulation. Unlike conventional approaches, GATSim agents possess diverse socioeconomic attributes, individual lifestyles, and evolving preferences that shape their mobility decisions through psychologically-informed memory systems, tool usage capabilities, and lifelong learning mechanisms. The main contributions of this study include: (1) a comprehensive architecture combining an urban mobility foundation model with agent cognitive systems and transport simulation environment, (2) a fully functional prototype implementation, and (3) systematic validation demonstrating that generative agents produce believable travel behaviors. Through designed reflection processes, generative agents in this study can transform specific travel experiences into generalized insights, enabling realistic behavioral adaptation over time with specialized mechanisms for activity planning and real-time reactive behaviors tailored to urban mobility contexts. Experiments show that generative agents perform competitively with human annotators in mobility scenarios while naturally producing macroscopic traffic evolution patterns. The code for the prototype system is shared at https://github.com/qiliuchn/gatsim.