Real-time tracking of activity scheduling/schedule execution within a unified data collection framework

Abstract

One of the major foci in transport research is to identify the temporal-spatial decision making structure embedded in activity scheduling and its linkage to actual activity execution. The latter part of the question hasn't been able to be explored explicitly in real life situation due to the lack of effective data collection means. The paper presents a real-time travel/activity survey system that incorporates the extraction of activity scheduling and execution information within one unified data collection framework. These "revealed" data could be used for explicitly defining the mechanism of how people's activity schedules dynamically adapt to social-demographic and temporal-spatial constraints and finally leads to the observed activity-travel patterns.

When Transport Geography Meets Social Psychology: Toward a Conceptual Model of Travel Behaviour

“…Recent advances in activity-based research account for unreasoned behaviour by studying activity scheduling and rescheduling processes (e.g., Zhou and Golledge, 2007;Lee and McNally, 2006;Doherty, 2005;Joh et al, 2004Joh et al, , 2005Doherty and Miller, 2000). Activities are planned over varying time horizons.…”

Travel mode detection based on GPS track data and Bayesian networks

“…A key benefit is removal of the burden from the respondent (Wolf et al, 1999;Zhou & Golledge, 2007). This burden reduction allows researchers to collect detailed travel information over a longer period without requiring an increased effort from respondents.…”

Dynamic Activity-Travel Diary Data Collection Using a GPS-Enabled Personal Digital Assistant

“…In order to solve this problem, one might think of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) with GPS technology for enhancing the data collection tool's mobility. The potential advantages of using a Personal Digital Assistant with GPS to supplement travel survey data collection are numerous: (i) when using a desktop computer-assisted data collection tool, the respondents have to remember the exact locations of their start and end positions, whereas with a PDA with GPS, trip origin, destination, and route data are automatically collected without burdening the respondent for the data; (ii) as the respondent may forget to report an activity trip, another advantage exists in recovery of unreported trips, as all routes are recorded; (iii) accurate trip start and end times are automatically determined, as well as trip lengths; (iv) the GPS data can be used to verify reported data; (v) both the data entry cost and the cost of post-processing the data, constitute a significant share of the total data collection cost (Zhou 2003). Both costs can be reduced to a minimum with computer-assisted forms of data collection.…”