Applying mobile phone data to travel behaviour research: A literature review

Abstract

Travel behaviour has been studied for decades to guide transportation development and management, with the support of traditional data collected by travel surveys. Recently, with the development of information and communication technologies (ICT), we have entered an era of big data, and many sources of novel data, including mobile phone data, have emerged and been applied to travel behaviour research. Compared with traditional travel data, mobile phone data have many unique features and advantages, which attract scholars in various fields to apply them to travel behaviour research, and a certain amount of progress has been made to date. However, this is only the beginning, and mobile phone data still have great potential that needs to be exploited to further advance human mobility studies. This paper provides a review of existing travel behaviour studies that have applied mobile phone data, and presents the progress that has been achieved to date, and then discusses the potential of mobile phone data in advancing travel behaviour research and raises some challenges that need to be dealt with in this process.