Estimating and forecasting travel demand have been a popular study topic
among transportation researchers; however the research needs to pursue
new direction with the advent of data from the potential availability of
newer types of data previously not envisaged. In this dissertation, the
author develops approaches for two aspects of travel demand analysis in
the transportation network: A newer OD estimation method, and a
household activity-based demand modeling framework.
First, a trip-based dynamic OD estimation model is developed. Several
previous studies on OD trip table estimation focused on a static problem
and many recent dynamic OD estimation methods also have not sufficiently
proved their practical applicability. In order to overcome the
shortcomings, this dissertation introduces supplementary information
(i.e., vehicle trajectory data) to a dynamic OD estimation model.
However, the trip-based approach has certain well-known limitations. OD
estimation results can not give satisfactory solutions for forecasting
purposes, and the estimated OD table only contains materialized trips,
which implies that no latent travel demand is included in the table. To
overcome these drawbacks, the second item of focus in the dissertation
is in developing a dynamic agent-based household activity and travel
demand simulation model framework named DYNAHAP. The framework
calculates a demand pattern in terms of activity chains generated by
synthetic families. A traffic simulator then executes the activity
chains, and finally an aggregated dynamic traffic pattern is generated.
In order to calibrate DYNAHAP, various activity data should be gathered.
Such tasks had been regarded very difficult or even nearly impossible
before, but with the development of data collecting technologies,
currently we have several ways for collecting the activity chains of
individuals. Like vehicle trajectory data, sample activity chains
collected from personal communication devices such as PDA (Personal
digital assistant) could be used for DYNAHAP calibration. Some numerical
test results also will be given for the purpose of proving the
performance of the developed models.
