Using National Survey Respondents as Consumers in an Agent-Based Model of Plug-In Hybrid Vehicle Adoption

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) offer the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if vehicle consumers are willing to adopt this new technology. Consequently, there is much interest in exploring PHEV market penetration models. In prior work, we developed an agent-based model (ABM) of potential PHEV consumer adoption that incorporated several spatial, social, and media influences to identify nonlinear interactions among potential leverage points that may impact PHEV market penetration. In developing that model, the need for additional data to properly inform both the decisionmaking rules and agent initialization became apparent. To address these issues, we recently conducted and analyzed an extensive consumer survey; in this paper, we modify the ABM to reflect the survey findings. A unique aspect is a one-to-one correspondence between agents in the model and survey respondents, and thus yielding distributions and cross correlations in agent attributes th...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ACCESS
• Authors: Margaret J. Eppstein, Donna M. Rizzo, Brian H. Y. Lee, Joseph S. Krupa, Narine Manukyan
• Keywords: ACCESS 2015