Utilizing Big Data to Verify and Enhance Route Choice Models in Travel Demand Modeling

About the project:

VDOT has invested roughly $5M to maintain and improve its long-range travel demand models, which are needed to help analyze candidate transportation projects.  A key step within these models is “trip assignment” where the path vehicles follow is represented in the network.  High-resolution GPS-level data offers the potential to improve the accuracy of this step.  However, VDOT staff are finding some discrepancies between route choice as currently represented in demand models and route choice as observed by GPS data—and it is not immediately clear how to resolve this discrepancy.  This research effort will determine the best way to use the GPS data to enhance model accuracy.  Note that a substantial amount of effort needed to make this determination has already been completed through an earlier research effort, and thus, this new study adds additional work to address this trip assignment step.

Project Team

Project Monitor

Other Investigators