A Study on Data Preprocessing for the Activity-Travel Simulator: A Case of an FEATHERS Seoul

Abstract

Research on activity-based travel demand forecasting and activity-travel simulator has invited an international attention for the last two decades. Ways to develop the activity-based simulator may be manifold. It is obvious that importing an existing simulator that has been proven internationally likely reduces the development cost and the risk of failure. By definition of the activity-based approach, however, the details of an activity-based simulator inevitably relies on particular social, economic and cultural characteristics of the society where the simulator is developed. When importing such a simulator from overseas, the researcher should be aware of the importance of tuning the system for the society to which the imported system is applied. There are many potential works on this, including for example the tuning of data structure that is likely different form that of the original system. We authors do not aware of any research report on this yet. The current paper aims to report the result of research to transform the input data for applying an existing overseas activity-travel simulator to Seoul Metropolitan Area. To this end, the paper first introduces FEATHERS that was developed in Belgium having Albatross at the core of the system. FEATHERS Seoul that is under development to apply original FEATHERS to Seoul is briefly described and the related problems of data structure mismatching are discussed. The paper then reports the effort to alleviate the problems and the results.