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We provide a comprehensive review of the literature on inferring activity-travel patterns (ATP) using multi-source big data; the increasing number of publications over time on this subject, demonstrates the importance of big data in this task. Our aims are to identify the advantages and research gaps in ATP inference and to promote further developments in this field. We clarify the fundamental concepts (i.e. ATP and its components), commonly used data sources, and inference processes employed in ATP inference studies. Emphasis is placed on two prominent big data sources: mobile phone data and smart card data. We outline the various approaches involved in the inference process, and we highlight existing shortcomings in data sources, ATP inference methodologies, and result validation. Based on the review, it is evident that future research should address several limitations in ATP inference. Firstly, it is necessary to improve the comprehensive understanding of ATP and understand the interrelationships among its different components. Secondly, it is necessary to integrate different data sources and leverage their respective strengths to gain deeper insights into activity-travel behaviour. Lastly, further investigation into emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence in ATP inference is warranted to improve inference accuracy. The findings of this study could provide valuable insights for policy makers, enabling them to gain a deeper understanding of activity-travel choice behaviour and develop more effective policies related to transportation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bus rapid transit systems (BRT) have been an indispensable public transportation pillar, especially in densely populated regions. Accurate insight into the BRT network's utilization is vital in BRT resource allocation planning contexts. This research focuses on how operators can utilize passengers' smart card data to develop origin-destination (OD) matrix-based business analytics. This research proposes a hybrid approach combining trip chaining, direct pairing, mode estimation methods, and visual analytics development. The novel approach is robust in handling incomplete smart card data transactions to generate origin-destination matrices and corresponding visual analytics as decision support systems for the BRT operators. As a case study, we applied and validated the proposed analytics to more than 20.6 million smart card transactions in one of the largest global BRT systems in Jakarta, Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alighting bus stops inferring is of great significance for origin–destination estimation. Cellular signaling data (CSD), a kind of individual trajectory generated by mobile phones, provides a new idea for alighting stop identification. To explore the capacity of CSD in this field, this study proposes a method of inferring alighting bus stops by integrating smart card data, bus GPS data, and CSD. Firstly, a correspondence table is generated by individual matching, which correspondingly links mobile phone users in CSD and bus passengers in smart card data. Secondly, the inferred alighting bus stops are determined by the radii of the circumscribed circles of triangles consisting of directly projective points, piecewise projective points, and CSD points. The proposed method is verified by an experimental dataset from a behavioral simulation experiment of 10 volunteers in Foshan, China. The results show that the recognition rate is 92.94% and the inference accuracy is 65.82%, or 93.67% under a one-stop error. In the case of a real dataset in Foshan, the proposed method with a recognition rate of 53.02% highly outperforms the trip-chain-based method. The difference in the recognition rate between the two datasets is due to that the real dataset is more likely to be incomplete than the experimental data, which indicates that the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method are sensitive to the data quality and completeness of CSD and bus GPS data. Having said that, the proposed method can infer both alighting stops of linked bus trips and single unlinked bus trips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As public transportation faces increasing ridership demand, metrics such as the number of passengers denied boarding become important for measuring the service quality of transit systems. Many studies in the past have used automated fare collection (AFC) (also known as smart card data) and automated vehicle location data to infer the probability distributions for commuters that experience unable-to-board (UTB) events in metro systems, but few have studied UTB events for buses. In this paper, we demonstrate that the probability distribution of UTB commuters inferred from AFC data can be modelled by a truncated binomial distribution under certain assumptions. This model is then validated against synthetic UTB events generated using simulations and against actual UTB events recorded from ground surveys. Finally, we apply our model on real AFC data of commuters in the Singapore bus network to serve as a case study. Our method enables transport planners and operators to identify bus stops and time intervals where overcrowding and UTB events is prevalent, so that appropriate measures can be taken to mitigate such occurrences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reasonable method for estimating alighting stops can provide a data guarantee for schedule design and vehicle scheduling. However, few studies, to our best knowledge, have addressed this problem using the variable distance threshold for different types of passengers. This paper is based on available smart card data, and a two-stage algorithm is designed to obtain missing alighting stations in the entry-only urban public transportation system. This algorithm divides passengers into seven types, determines varying distance thresholds for different passengers, and includes five assumptions. Based on the first three assumptions, the corresponding subalgorithms are designed, respectively, constituting the first-stage algorithm, and the first match for all passengers' alighting stations is carried out. The second-stage algorithm is designed on the basis of the latter two assumptions. A secondary match is conducted on data that were not successfully matched in the first stage to ensure that alighting stops for all passengers are identified. The proposed methods are verified using urban public transport data from the city of Zhuhai as an example. Research results show that the drop-off stops where approximately 74% of passengers can be determined after matching the first-stage algorithm. The distance thresholds for various passengers are different, and the distance thresholds for the same type of passengers over different days are also different. Compared with the traditional fixed distance threshold, the variable distance threshold for various passengers proposed in this paper can improve the match rate of alighting station estimate, about 9%. By appropriately extending the distance thresholds for different passengers, the match rate for passengers who work or live in the suburbs can be further improved, which is in line with the actual travel status of such passengers. The second-stage algorithm can identify alighting sites for a single or unlinked trip. The efficiency of the methodology proposed in this study can meet the needs for practical applications, which may be applied to urban public transport systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service bottlenecks are a key barrier to building a resilient public transport system. In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically extract the role of a station in dynamical public transport flow networks based on the emerging role discovery method in network science. The term "role" in this study refers to the distinctive position or function that a station plays within the public transport flow network. Using smart card data from Nanjing public bikesharing agencies, we first construct dynamical public transport flow networks with notions of dynamical graph and edge. We then develop a dynamical algorithm to recursively compute the structural flow characteristics of nodes in passenger flow networks. Non-negative Matrix Factorization is conducted to extract the role memberships from the derived structural feature matrix and interpret each role in terms of measurements with practical values. The network hubs and potential service bottlenecks are then identified based on their operating characteristics and dynamics. Furthermore, the day-to-day and within-day role dynamics of public transport stations over time are unveiled. The results contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between stations in the network, and the identification of roles provides insight for public transport agencies to improve service resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group travel behaviour widely exists in cities, but has not been well investigated by researchers. To fill this gap, this paper develops a co-existence-based methodological framework to systematically explore the spatiotemporal characteristics of group travel behaviour. We apply our framework to a case study of Shanghai, China, using a one-month tranche of metro smart card data. Results show that most travellers perform a small number of group trips, together with a small number of co-travellers. They usually travel in a dyad or triad group and form far more small social communities than large ones. Group travel behaviour is distinctly different from individual travel in terms of both time and space: group travellers are more likely to travel during weekends, on holidays, and in the afternoons and evenings. They also prefer to perform group behaviour near stations located in the city centre or the centres of new towns in suburban areas, and close to attractions and public facilities. The analysis we present has various potential applications such as improving the management of public events and supporting the design of group ticket policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]