This thesis is devoted to the analysis of the advanced and innovative tour-based travel demand modelling approach. Tour-based models explicitly recognise traffic as a derived demand for undertaking activities between homes and destinations. Travel demand of urban residents is modelled as trip sequences, which allows precise modelling of trip origin and destination points. The tour-based approach is deemed as a key step forwards towards even more complex agent-based modelling systems.
The thesis is structured around three main chapters that can be summarised succinctly as a revision of the state of the practice and research, description of empirical research of travel behaviour, and tour-based model development.
The 1st chapter revises the current state of practice and the research on travel demand modelling. All the building blocks that comprise transport models are discussed, and this lays the theoretical foundation for the following chapters. 1st chapter also gives a thorough comparison of trip-based and tour-based model-ling approaches and presents modelling environment.
The 2nd chapter defines the process of conducting an empirical research of the travel behaviour patterns of urban residents. The 2nd chapter defines survey methodology and important mobility parameters such as activity sequences and their probabilities of homogeneous urban population segments. The outputs from the 2nd chapter are not only important and interesting on their own, but they also flow into the final third part of the work.
The final 3rd chapter defines tour-based travel demand model development steps and showcases their practical application to the real-world scenario. Demand model quality assessment efforts and results are presented and discussed together with necessary explanations for significant deviations from reality. The resulting model is applied to investigate the performance of Siaurine Street in Vilnius, which is to be built in the coming years. At the very end of 3rd chapter a compre-hensive urban travel demand modelling framework is formulated and serves as a best practice guide.
General conclusions summarises the whole study. These are followed by an extensive list of references that were mentioned or relied upon to some extent in the work. Finally, separate lists of scientific publications and conference presen-tations conclude the thesis.
Overall, there have been five scientific articles published on the topic of the thesis. Four articles were published in scientific journals that are referenced in Clarivate Analytics Web of Science database, and one article was published in a scientific journal that is referenced in other databases
