OMOD: An open-source tool for creating disaggregated mobility demand based on OpenStreetMap

TL;DR

OMOD is an open-source, globally applicable tool that generates detailed, disaggregated mobility demand using OpenStreetMap data, facilitating transportation and energy system research for non-experts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, freely available activity-based mobility demand generator that works out-of-the-box with OSM data and is validated across multiple cities.

Findings

Successfully generates detailed daily activity schedules.

Validated accuracy across cities of different sizes.

Accessible tool for non-experts in mobility modeling.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the OpenStreetMap Mobility Demand Generator (OMOD), a new open-source activity-based mobility demand generation tool. OMOD creates a population of agents and detailed daily activity schedules that state what activities each agent plans to conduct, where, and for how long. The temporal aspect of the output is wholly disaggregated, while the spatial aspect is given on the level of individual buildings. In contrast to other existing models, OMOD is freely available, open-source, works out-of-the-box, can be applied to any region on earth, and only requires freely available OpenStreetMap (OSM) data from the user. With OMOD, it is easy for non-experts to create realistic mobility demand, which can be used in transportation studies, energy system modeling, communications system research, et cetera. OMOD uses a data-driven approach to generate mobility demand that has been calibrated with household travel survey data. This paper describes OMOD's architecture and validates the model for three cities ranging from 200,000 to 2.5 million inhabitants.