29 June 2021

The world is facing the challenge of meeting the climate goals while simultaneously accommodate human mobility demand. This challenge requires an efficient traffic system. Nils Breyer has studied how the system could be streamlined by using large-scale data sources for analysis in his dissertation Methods for Travel Pattern Analysis Using Large-Scale Passive Data.

A man standing in front of tram tracks with a tram in the background
In order for traffic planners to be able to make informed decisions to develop the traffic system, they must have a comprehensive overview of what people's travel patterns look like now and what it has looked like historically. The travel patterns can be used to find types of passenger transport that could be moved to more energy-efficient modes of transport or to model the effects that an investment in infrastructure could have.

Today, traffic planners use traffic models with in-data from surveys of people's travel habits and traffic counts. The disadvantages of these data sources are that it is expensive to conduct surveys and counts, it also provides a very limited number of observations and therefore the models built from these data can only give approximate estimates of people's travel patterns.

The aim of the dissertation is to expand the understanding of what is needed to process large-scale passive data sources such as cellular network data and smart-card data from public transit systems to analyse travel patterns. There are some challenges with this type of data sources. For example, there is a risk that short trips will not be registered in a reliable manner. However, one can improve the results with machine learning methods and in the dissertation it's showed that it can be done even if no training data is available.

– New large-scale passive data sources such as data from the cellular network and smart-card data from public transit systems open new opportunities to observe travel patterns in a way that can provide a much more detailed understanding of the actual travel patterns, says Nils Breyer who recently defended his dissertation in Infra Informatics at the Department Science and Technology (ITN), Division of Communication and Transport Systems (KTS).

More information

Latest news from LiU

A man in a lab coat holding a tube of blue liquid.

Electrodes created using light

Visible light can be used to create electrodes from conductive plastics completely without hazardous chemicals. This is shown in a new study carried out by researchers at Linköping and Lund universities.

Ryggtavlan på en man.

Greater risk that the political right falls for conspiracy theories

People who lean politically to the right are more likely to fall for conspiracy theories. But regardless of ideology, we tend to accept political claims that align with our own beliefs. This is shown in a doctoral thesis from LiU.

A man kneeling down on a field holding a grass mat.

Artificial turf in the Nordic climate – a question of sustainability

Artificial turf football pitches are better than natural turf from a sustainability perspective – with some reservations. This is demonstrated by researchers at LiUy in a new study using life cycle analyses.