Research on Restrained Study Areas for Effective Activity-based Travel Demand Forecasting

Recently, considerable attention has been devoted to studying the activity-based approach for transportation planning and forecasting. However, one of the practical limitations of applying most of the currently available activity-based models is their computation time. This research investigated the possibility of restraining the size of the study area to reduce the computation time when applying an activity-based model. By introducing an accuracy level of the model, the authors proposed an iterative approach to determine the minimum size of the study area required for a target territory. In the application, the authors investigated the required minimum size of the study area surrounding each of the 327 municipalities in Flanders with regard to two different transport modes: car as driver and public transport. Additionally, a validation analysis was conducted. All of the experiments were carried out by using the Forecasting Evolutionary Activity-Travel of Households and their Environmental Repercussion (FEATHERS) framework, an activity-based micro-simulation modeling framework currently implemented for the Flanders region of Belgium.