Decision support tools in transport planning

With the progress in transport demand modelling from aggregated, static and zone-based assignment models to fully dynamic agent- and activity-based transport simulations, the scope of data that needs to be collected, managed and maintained has changed dramatically. Furthermore, the type of analyses as well as potential analysts have changed. Whereas traditionally transport modelers would analyze data and create static maps, pre-defined graphs and tables we envision other end-users: transport authorities, architects, policy-makers and the service industry. These analysts can utilize a decision-support tool, based on the output of an agent-based model as well as analyze their own datasets and fully analyze spatial and temporal agent behavior without requiring continuous support from a transport modeler. In this paper, we present a framework of a decision support system designed to enable analysis of the wealth of information provided by agent-based transport demand models, travel diary surveys and automatically collected data on transport infrastructure usage. We present a practical application of the framework using it for analyzing the MATSim model of Singapore along with the Household Interview Travel Survey and public transport smart card transaction data. At the time of writing, the status of presented applications is only preliminary as not all necessary dataset and interfaces are yet fully developed, but the presented case-studies give already a very good idea about the potential scope and functioning of the decision support system. For future work, we envisage stakeholder workshops to better understand their diverse requirements and jointly refine what type of questions the decision support system should support to answer and adapt it accordingly.