SMART’s Distinguished speakers

SMART Presentation Summary

This presentation provided an overview of recent activity-based modelling work undertaken at the University of Toronto. Key features of the model are:

• It is activity-based. It models the generation and scheduling of the daily out-of-home activities in which people engage and which generate the need to travel. This focus on activities provides a far firmer behavioral basis for modelling urban travel than conventional “trip-based” methods that cannot explain the underlying motivations for travel.

• It is a microsimulation model, in which the activity/travel behavior of individual trip-makers is simulated. This provides a far more realistic framework in which to represent the constraints and opportunities faced by trip-makers, the influence of individual characteristics and preferences on travel choices, and the impacts of transportation system changes (and other policies) on the travel behavior of different types of persons (i.e., equity/social justice concerns).

• It is household-based. The activity/travel behavior of individuals is explicitly modeled within the context of the households within which they reside. This permits household-level constraints and other interactions to be explicitly modeled, in particular car allocation and ridesharing among household members and travel associated with joint activities among household members.

All of these design features are intended to produce a model system that is much more behaviorally plausible and much more appropriately policy sensitive than conventional travel demand models.

The presentation began by presenting the conceptual framework for the model, which provides a consistent and sound theoretical foundation for the empirical model. An operational empirical model based on this conceptual framework (TASHA – Travel/Activity Scheduler for Household Agents) was then presented, including results of a recent model validation exercise.

• View his PowerPoint presentation (pdf)

Links

Joint Program in Transportation’s Website:
Information on present and past research projects and reports

Biography and CV

Professor Eric Miller, a world renowned expert in transportation engineering, holds a Bahen-Tanenbaum Chair in Civil Engineering established by John Bahen and Joey Tanenbaum. Miller joined the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil Engineering in 1983. His research interests include the micro simulation of urban transportation and land-use systems, the sustainability of urban transportation systems, and improvements in conventional travel demand models. Professor Miller also serves and the Director of U of T’s Joint Program in Transportation.

• View his CV (pdf)

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