Effects of Periodic Location Update Polling Interval on the Reconstructed Origin–Destination Matrix

Effects of Periodic Location Update Polling Interval on the Reconstructed Origin–Destination Matrix: A Dutch Case Study Using a Data-Driven Method

Eftekhar, Z. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
Pel, A.J. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
van Lint, J.W.C. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)

2023

Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) data provides valuable insights into travel demand patterns by capturing people's consecutive locations. A major challenge, however, is how the polling interval (PI; the time between consecutive location updates) affects the accuracy in reconstructing the spatio-temporal travel patterns. Longer PIs will lead to lower accuracy and may even miss shorter activities or trips when not properly accounted for. In this paper, we analyze the effects of the PI on the ability to reconstruct an origin–destination (OD) matrix. We also propose and validate a new data-driven method that improves accuracy in case of longer PIs. The new method first learns temporal patterns in activities and trips, based on travel diaries, that are then used to infer activity-travel patterns from the (sparse) GSM traces. Both steps are data-driven thus avoiding any a priori (behavioral, temporal) assumptions. To validate the method we use synthetic data generated from a calibrated agent-based transport model. This gives us ground-truth OD patterns and full experimental control. The analysis results show that with our method it is possible to reliably reconstruct OD matrices even from very small data samples (i.e., travel diaries from a small segment of the population) that contain as little as 1% of the population’s movements. This is promising for real-life applications where the amount of empirical data is also limited.

data analytics
machine learning (artificial intelligence)
mobility
passive data
supervised learning
telecommuting
transportation planning analysis and application

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7eadfcb4-7219-4c9b-ba53-009fbc091d46

https://doi.org/10.1177/03611981231158638

0361-1981

Transportation Research Record, 2677 (9), 292-313

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 Z. Eftekhar, A.J. Pel, J.W.C. van Lint