Computational Transportation Science

CTS Happenings

September 25, 2012

Award Received by Joshua Auld, CTS-IGERT alumnus.

April 20, 2012

Congratulations to James Biagioni, CTS Fellow and CS PhD candidate, winner of the Dean's Scholar award.

January 2, 2012

James Biagioni, CTS Fellow, receives "Best Presentation Award" at SenSys2011

July 30, 2010

Dr. Ouri Wolfson, Dr. Phillip Yu, and Leon Stenneth, CS student and CTS Associate, recently had a paper accepted to the 6th IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob 2010).

MORE NEWS

February 4, 2011

CTS-IGERT is pleased to co-host a seminar with Dr. Kouros Mohammadian, CME, on Friday, February 4, 2011 at 2:30 p.m.

Location: Room 1047 ERF - Please note change of location!

Speaker: Dr. Eric Miller
Director, Cities Centre
Professor, Department of Civil Engineering
University of Toronto

Dr. Miller will present a seminar entitled "Agent-Based Modelling for Integrated Transportation - Land Use Policy Analysis".

ABSTRACT
The ILUTE (Integrated Land Use, Transportation, Environment) model system is an agent-based microsimulation model for the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in which disaggregate, process-based models of spatial socio-economic processes are used to evolve the GTA system state from a known base case to a predicted future year end state in one-year time steps. ILUTE has reached a state of operational implementation in which historical validation runs of the model system are being undertaken. A 100% GTA population of persons, families, households and dwelling units has been synthesized for the year 1986. Twenty-year historical simulations (1986-2006) have been run, with model outputs being compared to Canadian Census data and Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS) data for 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006. This paper presents recent findings from these historical validation tests, with particular emphasis on the system’s modelling of demographic evolution of the population and of the region’s housing market.

Demographic processes modelled include: aging, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and household formation/evolution. A particular challenge is the modelling of the large flows of in- and out-migration that occur in the GTA (the GTA gains approximately 100,000 net new people per year).

The residential housing market model components include: a mobility model that determines which households (and their dwelling units) are active in the market each time step; a model of new housing supply; a residential location preference model that determines active households’ preferences for active dwellings in their choice set; a model that determines the initial asking price of each active dwelling; and a disaggregate market clearing model which auctions active dwellings to potential buyers one dwelling at a time.

BIOGRAPHY:
Eric Miller is the inaugural Director of the University of Toronto Cities Centre. He has B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. degrees from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. He has been a faculty member in the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Toronto since 1983, where he is currently Professor and former Director of the University of Toronto Urban Transportation Research and Advancement Centre. He also served as Acting Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering during 1998-99, 2003 and 2007. Prof. Miller is Chair of the U.S. Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Travel Behavior and Values and past-Chair of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research. He is past-Chair of the TRB Sub-Committee on Integrated Transportation – Land Use Modeling and Member Emeritus of the TRB Transportation Demand Forecasting Committee. He served on the TRB Task Force on Moving Activity-Based Approaches to Practice and the US National Academy of Sciences Committee for Determination of the State of the Practice in Metropolitan Area Travel Forecasting. He recently chaired travel demand modelling peer review panels for magnetic levitation demonstration projects in Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Las Vegas, has been a member of technical advisory groups for the TRANSIMS implementations in Portland, Oregon, Buffalo, N.Y. and Burlington, Vermont, and has served on numerous travel demand peer review assignments, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, Denver, Vancouver and Waterloo, Ontario, and, currently the California Statewide Model. His research interests include: integrated land use transportation modelling; analysis of the relationship between urban form and travel behaviour; modelling transportation system energy use and emissions; and microsimulation modelling. He is the developer of GTAModel, a "best practice" regional travel demand modeling system used by the City of Toronto, the Region of Durham and the Cities of Mississauga and Brampton to forecast travel demand in the Greater Toronto Area; TASHA, a state-of-the-art activity-based microsimulation model of GTA travel; and ILUTE, an integrated land use – travel demand models system for the GTA. He is co-author of the textbook Urban Transportation Planning: A Decision-Oriented Approach, the second edition of which was published in 2001.