From zonal aggregated mobile phone data to origin-destination matrices: Revisiting methodologies developed for traffic counts data

In the last years, Passive Data have emerged as promising data sources to complement traditional household travel surveys are the main source of information to feed the transport models used for planning and evaluating transport policies, services and infrastructures. To bring complementary information, passive data such as Mobile Phone Data (MPD) have been considered as promising, as they are collected continuously and on larger samples. Unlike individual MPD, aggregated MPD avoids privacy concerns and can be collected over long periods of time, but it only provides the number of people in a given area during a given time interval and requires further processing for mobility management. This paper therefore proposes a framework for generating OD matrices from AMPD, using methods derived from traffic counts, thanks to an innovative analogy between these two data sources. To ensure that the most suitable methods are used, the framework is first tested in a simulated case and several algorithms are tested and compared. The framework is then tested using real data in Rouen, France. The results demonstrate the potential of AMPD to generate high quality OD matrices on a continuous basis, coherent with expected values in the simulated case and the results of a household survey and other passive data sources in the experimental case. The framework could be adapted for any passive source providing presence data, and is therefore generalizable to multiple case studies.