Space-Time Transportation System Modelling: from Traveler’s Characteristics to the Network Design Problem

Traditional network design problems only consider the long-term stationary travel patterns (e.g., fixed OD demand) and short-term variations of human mobility are ignored. This study aims to integrate human mobility characteristics and travel patterns into network design problems using a space-time network structure. Emerging technologies such as location-based social network platforms provide a unique opportunity for understanding human mobility patterns that can lead to advanced modeling techniques. To reach our goal, at first multimodal network design problems are investigated by considering safety and flow interactions between different modes of transport. We develop a network reconstruction method to expand a single-modal transportation network to a multi-modal network where flow interactions between different modes can be quantified. Then, in our second task, we investigate the trajectory of moving objects to see how they can reveal detailed information about human travel characteristics and presence probability with high-resolution detail. A time geography-based methodology is proposed to not only estimate an individual’s space-time trajectory based on his/her limited space-time sample points but also to quantify the accuracy of this estimation in a robust manner. A series of measures including activity bandwidth and normalized activity bandwidth are proposed to quantify the accuracy of trajectory estimation, and cutoff points are suggested for screening data records for mobility analysis. Finally, a space-time network-based modeling framework is proposed to integrate human mobility into network design problems. We construct a probabilistic network structure to quantify human’s presence probability at different locations and time. Then, a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) model is proposed to maximize the spatial and temporal coverage of individual targets. To achieve near optimal solutions for large-scale problems, greedy heuristic, Lagrangian relaxation and simulated annealing algorithms are implemented to solve the problem. The proposed algorithms are implemented on hypothetical and real world numerical examples to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the methodology on different network sizes and promising results have been obtained

Error Measures for Trajectory Estimations with Geo-Tagged Mobility Sample Data

Although geo-tagged mobility data (e.g., cell phone data and social media data) can be potentially used to estimate individual space-time travel trajectories, they often have low sample rates that only tell travelers\u27 whereabouts at the sparse sample times while leaving the remaining activities to be estimated with interpolation. This paper proposes a set of time geography-based measures to quantify the accuracy of the trajectory estimation in a robust manner. A series of measures including activity bandwidth and normalized activity bandwidth are proposed to quantify the possible absolute and relative error ranges between the estimated and the ground truth trajectories that cannot be observed. These measures can be used to evaluate the suitability of the estimated individual trajectories from sparsely sampled geo-tagged mobility data for travel mobility analysis. We suggest cutoff values of these measures to separate useful data with low estimation errors and noisy data with high estimation errors. We conduct theoretical analysis to show that these error measures decrease with sample rates and peoples\u27 activity ranges. We also propose a lookup table-based interpolation method to expedite the computational time. The proposed measures have been applied to 2013 geo-tagged tweet data in New York City, USA, and 2014 cell-phone data in Shenzhen, China. The results illustrate that the proposed measures can provide estimation error ranges for exceptionally large datasets in much shorter times than the benchmark method without using lookup tables. These results also reveal managerial results into the quality of these data for human mobility studies, including their distribution patterns