Use of Mobile Phone Data for Planning a Road Network

Use of Mobile Phone Data for Planning a Road Network: Application to the Country of Senegal

Wang, Y.

De Romph, E. (mentor)
Correia, G.H.A. (mentor)
Santos, B.F. (mentor)
Wiggenraad, P. (mentor)

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Transport & Planning

Planning & Design of Transport Systems

2015-06-16

The thesis is the outcome of a research on using mobile phone data to understand mobility patterns in a country and to give advice about decisions on how to design the national and regional road network. It provides not only several practical solutions to the existing road network design problems in Senegal but also a methodological approach, consisting of three main parts: filtering mobile phone traces to derive mobility patterns, estimating a new form of gravity model to understand how mobility patterns can be influenced, and optimizing road network based on the new gravity model. The formulation of the new gravity model indicates that the telecommunication patterns (i.e., the aggregate number of calls and text messages between zones) can be a better proxy than the distribution of population to predict mobility patterns and to measure the accessibility of a road network, allowing transport planners to make better decisions on road network design. The presented methodology is useful and reproducible not only to the country of Senegal but also to other countries where mobile phone data are available to transport planners.

mobile phone data
OD matrix estimation
new gravity model
road network design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e091a0d0-133d-4345-8399-4d5b140ba37b

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2015 Wang, Y.