Abstract: This paper discusses basic approaches in artificial transportation systems. It starts a survey on the current developments of traffic simulation systems, addresses the ineffectiveness of the top-down reductionism in conventional traffic simulation methods, and proposes an effective tool of bottom-up holism artificial transportation systems to solve the problems of complex transportations systems. The main subject here will be metropolitan transportation systems that take both metropolitan logistics and ecosystems into consideration. We will adopt a bottom-up agent-based technology to build models and management and control strategies for metropolitan transportation, logistics and ecosystems. Meanwhile, we will also integrate artificial societies, computational experiments, parallel systems, traffic level of service index, and the hall for workshop of metasynthetic engineering from qualitative to quantitative analysis to find effective solutions to problems in metropolitan transportation, logistics and ecosystems and build a new approach and framework to facilitate integrated, coordinated, and sustainable development of metropolitan systems under the principle of continuous investigation and improvement.

Key words: Artificial transportation systems, artificial societies, computational experiments, parallel systems, level of service, traffic simulation systems, agent-based technologies