REU 2006 –Purpose Detection For Individual Travel Behavior
Narin Persad-Maharaj, Mentor: Sean Barbeau
CUTR, University of South Florida
RESULTS
PROBLEM
•
The collection of traffic data is currently performed
using cumbersome surveys and questionnaires.
5 sample trips
Human Vs. Purpose Detector
DOR Code
Purpose
Detector:
General
Purpose
Predicted:
General
Purpose
Predicted:
Specific Purpose
3200
Social &
Go out:
Recreatio- Sports bar,
Nal
Movies etc.
Social &
Recreational
Movies
(Muvico)
8800
WORK
Go to work
Meals
Eat out
1310
Shopping
& Errands
Buy goods:
groceries,
clothing, etc.
Shopping
& Errands
Buy goods…
(WalMart)
8300
School or
Religious
Go to School Social &
Rec.
Exercise
(Baseball)
3500
Social &
Rec.
Relaxation,
Vacation
Vacation
(Busch Gardens)
http://amyletter.com/Florida%20from%20Space.JPG
MOTIVATION
The dependency on human memory to
record and recall personal travel behavior introduces a strong likelihood of
errors.
SOLUTION
Fig 5c. A table tbltrips
is then updated with the
purpose information
per tripid.
Fig 3. Broadcasts from
Satellites are used by
Matt’s cell phone to
determine his coordinate.
By using data collected from GPS
enabled cell phones and relating
it to electronic maps the task of
determining an individual’s travel
purpose can be fully automated.
Fig 5a. The
Purpose Detector
program obtains
the DOR CODE
from ArcMap.
Fig. 5b
It then queries it
against a database to
retrieve its General
(ex. Shopping) and
Specific Purpose
(ex. Buy Gas/car
services)
THE SOFTWARE
The Purpose Detection program
uses a java API belonging to ArcGIS (a
GIS mapping application package) to
calculate a cell phone’s global coordinate
and relate it to a spatial environment. In this
research the spatial environment is Hillsborough
County and it is represented in ArcGIS as a 2-d
map divided into several polygons that represent
individual real-estate.
Among the several attributes of a polygon is
a field called the Department of Revenue Resources Code (DOR_CODE). By first retrieving the
value of this DOR_CODE and then querying it
against a database that was categorized by the
researcher according to the DOR CODES’ business
type, the traveler’s purpose can be determined.
IMPLEMENTATION: ArcGIS, ArcMap, NetBeans
IDE 5.0
Purpose
Detector
Software
Fig 4. Matt ends his trip. The featured screenshot
shows the DOR_CODE of the pink highlighted polygon
in ArcMap, a GIS mapping application.
Purpose
Detector:
Specific
Purpose
Social &
Rec.
CONCLUSION
The performance of the Purpose Detector
shows that it is significantly more dependable
than archaic methods of purpose determination
and is liberated of the problems that burden
archaic methods of traffic data analysis.
FUTURE WORK:
The discrepancies between the purposes of
DOR CODES 8800 and 8300 were due purely to
the classification of the DOR CODE business
types by Hillsborough County. In fact, DOR
CODE 8800 is classified as Federal under HBC’s
zoning laws but is actually a restaurant—Red
Lobster, and the trip pertaining to DOR CODE
8300 concluded at a baseball field that is owned
by a school. Future revisions of the Purpose
Detector will include improving the classification
of these somewhat ambiguous DOR CODES.
Acknowledgements
Sean Barbeau—Mentor, Alfredo Perez—
researcher, Tiffany Burrel—co researcher.
Department of Computer Science & Engineering