Modelling hospital visitors for the city of Leuven as input for a FEATHERS-MATSim simulation

Abstract

Investigation of the local effects of travel demand and the study of thin flows (low volume travel demand) require micro-modelling and simulation. The ongoing Smart-PT project focuses on demand responsive public transport and other collective transportation services; the Leuven region is used as a research case. This paper reports on the first steps in the project. Those steps aim to model the large number of trips generated by the academic hospital in the moderately sized city. The hospital attracts patients and their visitors from all over Flanders. The method used to sample them from a synthetic population is described and first results are reported. The daily agendas for the synthetic individuals are generated by the FEATHERS activity-based model. The next steps consisting of schedule adaptation for hospital personnel and visitors are briefly discussed. Those are non-trivial but essential to support the micro modelling required to study local public and collective travel demand.