Integrative traffic flow analysis of public transport data in the city of Lisbon

Sofia Maria Pais Cerqueira

Key information

Authors:

Sofia Maria Pais Cerqueira (Sofia Maria Pais Cerqueira)

Supervisors:

Rui Miguel Carrasqueiro Henriques (Rui Miguel Carrasqueiro Henriques); Elisabete Maria Mourinho Arsénio (Elisabete Maria Mourinho Arsénio)

Published in

January 27, 2021

Abstract

The worldwide cities face a growing massification of population and, consequently new challenges arise, including the purse of sustainable urban mobility. In this context, public transport modes are essential to meet travellers' needs and an adequate offer is dependent on the understanding of the real traffic dynamics within the city, which implies acquire individual trip data, understand commuting patterns, and observe multimodal views. This work aims at addressing these challenges by proposing an approach to infer Origin-Destination matrices from smart-card validations able to: detect commuting patterns and vulnerabilities on the network pertaining to walking distances and trip durations; decompose traffic flows by calendrical rules and user profiles; support context-aware descriptive analytics. Given the fact that automated fare collection systems can assume an only-entry control, unimodal and multimodal models for alight bus stop inference are further proposed in this thesis. Lisbon city is used as the study case, with the aforementioned contributions being assessed over the CARRIS and METRO transportation network. The gathered results show that 70% alighting stops can be estimated with high confidence degree from CARRIS smart-card data and with the presence of METRO smart-card data constitutes an improvement of 10%. The inferred OD matrices allowed the identification of vulnerabilities in the network, offering CARRIS new knowledge and a means to understand multimodal dynamics and validate OD assumptions. The contributions of our work were developed in the context of the ILU project, in close cooperation with the primary bus operator in Lisbon, CARRIS, and the Lisbon City Council (CML).