Workshop: Advancing the Science of Transportation Demand Modeling; Berkeley, California; Spring 2017

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Transportation has an immense impact on quality of life, economy, equity, and environment. Better planning, design, and operations of our transport system are of critical importance to society. While transport demand models are widely relied on to guide transport infrastructure and policy decisions, the transport demand modeling field has been criticized in recent times for poor forecast performance. Among the blame for the poor prediction is the lack of a rigorous, scientific approach of developing and testing of these forecasting models. At the same time, the field is on the cusp of the next generation of models driven by mega data coming online and exciting developments in data analysis methods. Researchers from disciplines such as Computer Science and Physics are entering the domain, but for the most part are siloed from the more traditional transport demand modeling community and its behavioral grounding. Finally, not only are new data and methods changing the modeling, but transport itself is being revolutionized with clean, connected, app-driven, and autonomous transport modes/services. In light of these limitations, challenges, and opportunities, this 2-day workshop aims to advance the science of transport demand modeling. There are major flaws in the existing knowledge and collection of methods that are used by researchers and practitioners to predict how humans respond to transport policies. The operating practices of the transport demand modeling research community tend to promote silos and produce methodological paradigms that are slow to adjust. Further, they do not provide incentives or expectations of rigorous testing, replication, and validation of the transport demand prediction system. While the community has attempted to address these shortcomings, the field is adjusting only at the margins and not leading to significant cross-disciplinary communication. The workshop will bring together leading researchers from different disciplines and at different stages in their careers to fundamentally rethink the field of transport demand modeling and propose new approaches on how research should be directed, conducted, funded, and evaluated. Attendance will consist of 25-30 researchers from traditional and new domains who focus on state-of-the-art transport demand modeling. The objective is to define the next generation of transport demand models such that it: (i) is subject to rigorous, scientific testing, (ii) effectively integrates researchers and ideas from different disciplines, and (iii) is germane to the looming transformation in transport (clean, connected, autonomous, etc.).