PLACE:319 Snedecor Hall

SPEAKER:
Paul Speckman
Department of Statistics
University of Missouri-Columbia

TITLE:
Generating Activities for Computer-Simulated Traffic

ABSTRACT:

TRANSIMS is a comprehensive computer simulation of all traffic in a city. Developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, the program is an immensely powerful tool that promises to enable traffic planners to predict the effect of changes ranging from a new traffic light to building a brand new highway. Under the auspices of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, the author and colleagues have developed an activity generator for TRANSIMS. This program generates all the activities along with times and locations for everyone in a simulated city.  The problem is to simulate activities for each household that capture the dynamics of household interaction including shared rides and to distribute these activities in a realistic
way among all the possible work, shopping, etc. locations.  Our approach is based on resampling and discrete choice modeling.    Given survey data from a sample of households, a multivariate regression tree is built to
group the survey households into nodes of similar behavior based on household demographics.  These households provide a library of skeletal activity patterns.  Each household in the traffic simulation is matched to a survey household by demographics to obtain a skeletal pattern.  New locations for each activity in the skeletal pattern are then randomly generated using choice models.  The talk will show how these techniques are being used to generate activity sets for Portland, Oregon.
 

COFFEE: 3:45 p.m., 104 Snedecor Hall