Abstract: Current activity-based modeling (ABM) has two major limitations. First, ABM conventionally relies on household travel survey (HTS) data, which suffers from low spatial heterogeneity due to a low sampling rate (e.g., 1-5% of the population) and a low collection frequency. This issue results in a poor spatial resolution of generated and forecasted travel demand. Second, ABM performs population synthesis and daily activity schedule generation independently due to the lack of data for spatiotemporal travel choices (i.e., activity time and destination choices). This causes a loss of interdependency between sociodemographic attributes and corresponding activity-travel choices. Given the continuous collection of mobility patterns at a high spatial resolution for a large proportion of the population from transit smart cards (SC), the fusion of HTS and SC data has the potential to address the above limitations. The talk presents a novel cluster-based data fusion method that exploits the benefits of both HTS and SC data to jointly generate a spatially heterogeneous synthetic population of individuals and their activity schedules. The properties of the proposed method are analytically derived to ensure an interpretable and trustworthy data fusion. The application of the proposed method is demonstrated using the HTS and SC data from Seoul, South Korea.
Bio: Dr Prateek Bansal is a Presidential Young (Assistant) Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Before joining NUS in 2022, he was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Imperial College London and did a Ph.D. from Cornell, an MSc from UT Austin, a BTech from IIT Delhi. Prateek leads the Behavioural Cognitive Science Lab at NUS and is a co-principal investigator of the Adaptive Mobility module at Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore. His research group is interested in creating new methods to address challenging questions related to mobility behavior and the adoption of emerging technologies at an individual level and an urban scale. His research has led to over 55 journal articles. Apart from top Transportation journals, he regularly publishes in interdisciplinary journals like Energy Economics and Statistics and Computing. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Transport Economics & Policy and the Journal of Public Transportation. He also serves as the editorial board member of Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, and Journal of Choice Modelling, among others. He is a member of the TRB’s standing committees on Travel Survey Methods (AEP25) and Travel Forecasting (AEP50), and a regular board member of the International Association of Travel Behavior Research (IATBR).
