Assessment of the Effect of Micro-Simulation Error on Key Travel Indices: Evidence from the Activity-Based Model FEATHERS
Year: 2011
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Current transportation models often do not explicitly address the degree of uncertainty in travel forecasts.Of particular interest in activity-based travel demand models is the model uncertainty that is caused by the statistical distributions of random components, i.e. micro-simulation error.Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to assess the impact of micro-simulation error on two key travel indices, namely the average daily number of trips per person and the average daily distance traveled per person.The effect of micro-simulation error will be investigated by running the activity-based modeling framework FEATHERS 200 times using the same 10% fraction of the population.Results show that micro-simulation errors are limited especially when disaggregation is limited to two levels.Notwithstanding, results indicate that for more elaborate analyses a 10% fraction might not be sufficient.The size of micro-simulation error increases along with complexity.Moreover, more commonly used transport modes such as using the car as driver have a lower error rate.Further research should investigate the impact of the population fraction on the micro-simulation error rates.Besides, one could also investigate other aspects (e.g. the number of activities) involved in the activity-scheduling process.
Institution: Hasselt University
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W605721975