Modeling and Forecasting Passenger Travel: from the lens of Regional Economic Simulator of Ontario (TRESO)

The provincial model, Regional Economic Simulator of Ontario (TRESO) simulates the evolution of and interactions between the Ontario economy, the demand for personal and commercial travel by residents and visitors, and their cumulative impacts on the transport network and services serving the province. In this talk, I will be providing an overview of TRESO model architecture, followed by data requirements and a deep dive on the activity-based passenger travel component. I will conclude the talk by presenting a number of current and future model applications.

Dr. Naznin Sultana Daisy is a Transport Modeler at the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, where she leads land use modeling files, and works on two state-of-practice transportation demand models including Greater Golden Horseshoe Model (GGHM), and Regional Economic Simulator of Ontario (TRESO) to support regional transportation master plan projects and corridor planning studies. She also teaches transportation courses at the University of Toronto as a Sessional Lecturer. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) (2011 and 2013, respectively) and her Ph.D. degree from the Dalhousie University (2018). Dr. Naznin’s PhD research focused on the development of a state of art activity based model, Scheduler for Activities, Locations, and Travel (SALT) model, a tool which has the ability to predict and construct the 24-hour activity-travel patterns and the corresponding travel linked with activities accomplished by individuals, and could be utilized in various short-term and long term transportation planning needs such as bike lane implementation, transport emission estimation, transit-oriented development, transportation equity, disruptive/emerging mode choice decisions etc.