Managing travel demand: Location recommendation for system efficiency based on mobile phone data

TL;DR

This paper presents a mobile phone data-driven location recommendation system that manages travel demand by balancing individual preferences and road capacity constraints, significantly reducing travel delays.

Contribution

It introduces a novel machine learning and optimization framework that infers preferences and manages travel demand to improve traffic efficiency using mobile phone data.

Findings

Travel delay reduced by up to 52% with 31% less satisfaction.

Moderate sacrifices in individual utility lead to substantial travel time savings.

Synergy among collective behaviors enhances overall system efficiency.

Abstract

Growth in leisure travel has become increasingly significant economically, socially, and environmentally. However, flexible but uncoordinated travel behaviors exacerbate traffic congestion. Mobile phone records not only reveal human mobility patterns, but also enable us to manage travel demand for system efficiency. In this paper, we propose a location recommendation system that infers personal preferences while accounting for constraints imposed by road capacity in order to manage travel demand. We first infer unobserved preferences using a machine learning technique from phone records. We then formulate an optimization method to improve system efficiency. Coupling mobile phone data with traffic counts and road network infrastructures collected in Andorra, this study shows that uncoordinated travel behaviors lead to longer average travel delay, implying the opportunities in managing travel demand by collective decisions. The interplay between congestion relief and overall satisfied location preferences observed in extensive simulations indicate that moderate sacrifices of individual utility lead to significant travel time savings. Specifically, the results show that under full compliance rate, travel delay fell by 52% at a cost of 31% less satisfaction. Under 60% compliance rate, 41% travel delay is saved with a 17% reduction in satisfaction. This paper highlights the effectiveness of the synergy among collective behaviors in increasing system efficiency.