Optimising transport management: anonymous individual mobility traces
Author
Prof. Kay W. Axhausen
ETH Zurich
It is a well-known issue that many roads have traffic jams during peak periods. Big data is still almost never used for traffic management. The large quantity of data from both smartphones and satellite navigation devices could help to improve traffic management methods and models. The NRP 75 project ‘Using data traces to improve transport systems’ is changing this.
The data used by the researchers includes tracking data – i.e. GPS data from smartphones. The data is fed into MATSim (which stands for Multi-Agent Transport Simulation), an open-source platform for developing agent-based simulations. The NRP 75 project has enabled even more refined analyses of how people move about and where traffic jams develop, for example. This enabled more specific analyses, such as that into the changes in mobility behaviour during the coronavirus pandemic.
International and interdisciplinary research collaboration
The ‘Using data traces to improve transport systems’ project under NRP 75 was an international and interdisciplinary research collaboration between the research groups of the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems and the Learning & Adaptive Systems Group at ETH Zurich, together with research groups from TU Berlin and TU Graz.
- Kay W. Axhausen, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, ETH Zurich
- Joseph Molloy, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, ETH Zurich
- Christopher Tchervenkov, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, ETH Zurich
- Thomas Schatzmann, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, ETH Zurich
- Andreas Krause, Learning & Adaptive Systems Group, ETH Zurich
- Anastasia Makarova, Learning & Adaptive Systems Group, ETH Zurich
- Kai Nagel, Institut für Land- und Seeverkehr, TU Berlin
- Martin Fellendorf, Institut für Strassen- und Verkehrswesen, TU Graz
- Alberto Castro, University of Basel
- Thomas Götschi, University of Basel
- Beaumont Schoeman, University of Basel
- Uros Tomic, ZHAW