GIS-based Episode Reconstruction Using GPS Data for Activity Analysis and Route Choice Modeling

Abstract

Most transportation problems arise from individual travel decisions. In response, transportation researchers had been studying individual travel behavior – a growing trend that requires activity data at individual level. Global positioning systems (GPS) and geographical information systems (GIS) have been used to capture and process individual activity data, from determining activity locations to mapping routes to these locations. Potential applications of GPS data seem limitless but our tools and methods to make these data usable lags behind. In response to this need, this dissertation presents a GIS-based toolkit to automatically extract activity episodes from GPS data and derive information related to these episodes from additional data (e.g., road network, land use). The major emphasis of this dissertation is the development of a toolkit for extracting information associated with movements of individuals from GPS data. To be effective, the toolkit has been developed around three design principles: transferability, modularity, and scalability. Two substantive chapters focus on selected components of the toolkit (map-matching, mode detection); another for the entire toolkit. Final substantive chapter demonstrates the toolkit’s potential by comparing route choice models of work and shop trips using inputs generated by the toolkit. There are several tools and methods that capitalize on GPS data, developed within different problem domains. This dissertation contributes to that repository of tools and methods by presenting a suite of tools that can extract all possible information that can be derived from GPS data. Unlike existing tools cited in the transportation literature, the toolkit has been designed to be complete (covers preprocessing up to extracting route attributes), and can work with GPS data alone or in combination with additional data. Moreover, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of route choice decisions for work and shop trips by looking into the combined effects of route attributes and individual characteristics.