Estimation of Hourly Link Population and Flow Directions from Mobile CDR

Estimation of Travel Demand Models with Limited Information: Floating Car Data for Parameters’ Calibration

This paper attempts to integrate data from models, traditional surveys and big data in a situation of limited information. The goal is to increase the capacity of transport planners to analyze, forecast, and plan passenger mobility. (Big) data are a precious source of information and substantial effort is necessary to filter, integrate, and convert big data into travel demand estimates. Moreover, data analytics approaches without demand models are limited because they allow: (a) the analysis of historical and/or real-time transport system configurations, and (b) the forecasting of transport system configurations in ordinary conditions. Without the support of travel demand models, the mere use of (big) data does not allow the forecasting of mobility patterns. The paper attempts to support traditional methods of transport systems engineering with new data sources from ICTs. By combining traditional data and floating car data (FCD), the proposed framework allows the estimation of travel demand models (e.g., trip generation and destination). The proposed method can be applied in a specific case of an area where FCD are available, and other sources of information are not available. The results of an application of the proposed framework in a sub-regional area (Calabria, southern Italy) are presented.

Transport System Models and Big Data: Zoning and Graph Building with Traditional Surveys, FCD and GIS

The paper deals with the integration of data provided from traditional transport surveys (small data) with big data, provided from Information and Communication Technology (ICT), in building Transport System Models (TSMs). Big data are used to observe historical mobility patterns and transport facilities and services, but they are not able to assess ex-ante effects of planned interventions and policies. To overcome these limitations, TSMs can be specified, calibrated and validated with small data, but they are expensive to obtain. The paper proposes a procedure to increase the benefits of TSMs’ building in forecasting capabilities, on one side; and limiting the costs connected to traditional surveys thanks to the availability of big data, on the other side. Small data (e.g., census data) are enriched with Floating Car Data (FCD). At the current stage, the procedure focuses on two specific elements of TSMs: zoning and graph building. These processes are both executed considering the estimated values of an intensity function of FCDs, consistently with traditional methods based on small data. The data-fusion of small and big data, operated with a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool, in a real extra-urban context is presented in order to validate the proposed procedure.

Towards Recognising Individual Behaviours from Pervasive Mobile Datasets in Urban Spaces

Mobile phone network data, routinely collected by its providers, possess very valuable encoded information about human behaviors. Intensive tourist activities in urban spaces bring smartness via mobile phone fingerprints into the understanding of an urban ecosystem. Due to the diverse processes that govern mobile communication, mining the geolocations of individuals seems to be non-trivial, tedious, and even irregular, which can lead to an incomplete trajectory. Enriching trajectories with infrastructural facilities is another challenge. We provide a unified approach, comprised of both informal and formal elements, to obtain a common framework, which maps pervasive datasets into a collection of individual patterns in urban spaces, to obtain context-enhanced trajectory reconstructions. Through the algorithmization of the approach, we acquire a study that provides new insights on individual and anonymized tourist behaviors. In order to obtain individual behaviors, it is necessary to carry out an arduous extraction process. We propose a multi-agent system architecture and predefined message streams, which are transported on a message-broker platform. We also propose all of the basic algorithms that compose the prototype of the entire multi-agent system. All algorithms were formally analyzed due to termination and time complexity. System evaluation, together with a few basic experiments, was also carried out. The performance evaluation results authenticate system feasibility, credibility, and vitality. Those factors prove its effectiveness and the possibility to build the target system, whilst supporting every urban ecosystem. The system would also strongly influence municipal services to understand urban context and operate more effectively in order to support tourist activities to become safer and more comfortable.