Investigating the minimum size of study area for an activity-based travel demand forecasting model

Abstract

The requirement of large computation time is currently one of the most important practical issues of applying activity-based models. In this study, we investigated the minimum size of the study area needed for each of the 327 municipalities of Flanders using the FEATHERS framework. The results show that when only a particular territory is considered in a specific project, it is possible to rebuild a relatively small study area for this target territory. Running the model in such a new study area will not deteriorate the model accuracy, but will improve the model’s operational efficiency significantly and will also facilitate the further development as well as the dissemination of this modeling framework.