Analysis of Travel Patterns from Cellular Network Data

Sammanfattning: Traffic planners are facing a big challenge with an increasing demand for mobility and a need to drastically reduce the environmental impacts of the transportation system at the same time. The transportation system therefore needs to become more efficient, which requires a good understanding about the actual travel patterns. Data from travel surveys and traffic counts is expensive to collect and gives only limited insights on travel patterns. Cellular network data collected in the mobile operators infrastructure is a promising data source which can provide new ways of obtaining information relevant for traffic analysis. It can provide large-scale observations of travel patterns independent of the travel mode used and can be updated easier than other data sources. In order to use cellular network data for traffic analysis it needs to be filtered and processed in a way that preserves privacy of individuals and takes the low resolution of the data in space and time into account. The research of finding appropriate algorithms is ongoing and while substantial progress has been achieved, there is a still a large potential for better algorithms and ways to evaluate them.The aim of this thesis is to analyse the potential and limitations of using cellular network data for traffic analysis. In the three papers included in the thesis, contributions are made to the trip extraction, travel demand and route inference steps part of a data-driven traffic analysis processing chain. To analyse the performance of the proposed algorithms, a number of datasets from different cellular network operators are used. The results obtained using different algorithms are compared to each other as well as to other available data sources.A main finding presented in this thesis is that large-scale cellular network data can be used in particular to infer travel demand. In a study of data for the municipality of Norrköping, the results from cellular network data resemble the travel demand model currently used by the municipality, while adding more details such as time profiles which are currently not available to traffic planners. However, it is found that all later traffic analysis results from cellular network data can differ to a large extend based on the choice of algorithm used for the first steps of data filtering and trip extraction. Particular difficulties occur with the detection of short trips (less than 2km) with a possible under-representation of these trips affecting the subsequent traffic analysis.