Concept of an open-access travel demand modeling platform

Abstract

Travel demand models have an increasing role in decision- and policy-making. The prevailing practice of modelling raises some concerns, main limitations being of human and technical nature– adopting advanced models requires skilled professionals and resources. This paper introduces an open-access modelling concept, which is designed to overcome these barriers. The concept centralizes the bulk of model-development and application tasks, leaving only the coding of proposed project scenarios to the user. This way skilled professionals and the resources necessary for data-intensive models can be concentrated on regional model-building. Planners and policy-makers can access a valid model through open interfaces, where they can define scenarios and evaluate them without intensive model-building tasks and large-scale data collection.This open-access concept − developed by a single organization − provides an access to a theoretically sound model to a wide array of users, where advanced techniques are implemented. Besides overcoming concerns of resources, expertise or data, and eliminating the reluctance to adopt advanced models, another great advantage is that the same model can be used through a controlled user interface by different organizations making results comparable.Project ETRAFFIC is a conceptual framework for implementing an open-access modelling platform − funded by the Hungarian government. The prototype of the implementation is under development.