Research projects     Multi-modal transport planning

BAMBOO

BIG DATA
ANALYTICS
MOBILITY PLANNING
From anonymized mobile phone records to the first transport simulation toolset specifically adapted to take advantage of massive, passively collected data: Aimsun has collaborated with Nommon Solutions and Technologies to develop new methodologies and algorithms for extracting travel demand information and integrating the data into a mobility modeling platform. Ito World provided the interactive visualisation tools to bring it all to life.
The new features resulting from BAMBOO are already implemented in Aimsun Next software. This is particularly valuable for modeling new forms of mobility to face the most recent approaches to traffic management, for which the current tools typically fall short due to the need for higher levels of disaggregation and behavioral insights.

Project Description

Three case studies provided different data distribution and technical challenges, as well as different mobility objectives:

  • Santander, a main city in the north of Spain that faces high congestion level: to evaluate the quality of the travel demand information that can be generated from mobile phone records for urban environments.
  • AP-7, one of the major highways along the Mediterranean coast of Spain: with data provided by the toll operator, it presented an interesting opportunity to test the toolset in an interurban environment.
  • Spanish interprovincial, covering the whole Spanish territory: focused on the visualisation of complex mobility information.

Moreover, mobile-phone provider Orange provided access to large-scale tailored data and stakeholders for each case study. 

The main purpose of BAMBOO was to improve demand generation from mobile phone data, whether aggregated (origin-destination trip matrices) or disaggregated (activity-travel diaries). The Aimsun team specifically worked on the following tasks:

  • Integrating new travel demand characterization from mobile phone data fused with other data sources into Aimsun Next software architecture.
  • Developing new algorithms for identifying centers of activity and their connection to the road network.
  • Improving the calibration and validation framework of a traffic network model using new demand characterization, including aspects such as value of time (VOT), trip departure time, mode and route choice.

Aimsun focused on overcoming the limitations associated with travel demand generation and representation in the context of dynamic traffic assignment, traditionally used in the sector to characterize demand derived on home-based surveys. The new demand characterization offers richer and more reliable information for simulating more realistic traffic conditions.

Consortium

Coordinator: Nommon Solutions and Technologies, S.L.

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