Exploring strengths and weaknesses of mobility inference from mobile phone data vs. travel surveys

Abstract

Origin–destination (OD) matrices serve as a basis for travel demand modelling. Traditionally, they are derived from travel surveys that collect detailed trip information but with several shortcomings. Mobile phones are regarded as a useful source of information on people’s daily mobility. This work explores the use of mobile data in the context of mobility studies by comparing matrices derived from both types of sources over the same region. The results reveal many common features in the trip information. Moreover, although the use of mobile technology may raise questions for short trips, the huge representativeness of this technology captures the mobility in OD connections extensively regardless the area. This is crucial for non-populated areas (e.g. industrial parks or educational campuses), which constitute important mobility hotspots. Based on these findings, an applicable data fusion approach to obtain the optimum accuracy from these heterogeneous sources is presented and applied.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile phone data
• household travel surveys
• OD matrices

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees who provided valuable constructive criticism on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Noelia Caceres http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7160-1335

L. M. Romero http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8963-9879

Francisco G. Benitez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7712-1666

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ERDF of the European Union for financial support via the project DIURMOVIL under ‘Programa Operativo FEDER de Andalucia 2011-2015: [grant number G-GI3001/IDIK (https://circabc.europa.eu/webdav/CircaBC/MARE/steccostclimat/Library/country_information/spain/andalucia%20porgrama%20operativo.pdf)’, and by the Public Works Agency and Regional Ministry of Public Works and Housing of the Regional Government of Andalusia. One of the authors also acknowledges funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Torres Quevedo Programme: [grant number PTQ-13-06428] (https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2015/07/29/pdfs/BOE-A-2015-8509.pdf).