Transferability: Creating Representative Activity Schedules Using 2001 NHTS

To generate representative travel patterns quickly for a city’s or a region’s population for use in homeland security modeling, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has developed a methodology for generating representative activity schedules that uses a nationwide travel survey, the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). Previously, in order to reasonably model cities, activity-based transportation models required as input an activity/travel survey representing travel in the local area of interest. The validity of this approach was evaluated using by using both the NHTS and the 2000 Twin Cities Metropolitan Area Travel Behavior Inventory (TBI) to separately model the activities of a synthetic population for the Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN (Twin Cities) metropolitan area and comparing the results. Prior to assessing the new approach of generating local activities using a national data set, a basic validation was completed to determine how successful LANL’s TRansportation ANalysis and SIMulation System (TRANSIMS-LANL) was at producing activities for a synthetic population based on a local travel survey. For this purpose, the TBI was utilized to generate activity schedules for a synthetic population. These schedules were compared directly to the TBI itself. An analysis showed that TRANSIMS-LANL was able to produce activities that closely reflect the original survey. In general, the generated total trip and activity counts varied from the survey by approximately one percent. Using the national survey to generate activities, TRANSIMS-LANL underestimated the total number of trips and activities by only eight percent and six percent, respectively.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Henson, Kriste
  • Cuellar, Leticia
  • Kubicek, Deborah
  • Tallman, Charles David
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2009-1-11 to 2009-1-15
• Date: 2009

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 20p
• Monograph Title: TRB 88th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: National security; Traffic simulation; Travel behavior; Travel patterns; Travel surveys
• Identifier Terms: TRANSIMS (Computer model)
• Uncontrolled Terms: Activity schedules
• Geographic Terms: Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (Minnesota)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01127297
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 09-3457
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Apr 28 2009 8:10AM