ETHZ - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
ETHZ focus on the planning and operation of transport systems with the aim to satisfy current and future requirements. Societal and land use developments as well as the changes in global logistic systems are studied and integrated in the modelling of transport systems. The increasing importance of travel demand management strategies for capacity enhancements in the face of scarcer infrastructure resources and for the reduction of impacts on humans and the environment is reflected by the IVT‟s research agenda. The Chair for Transport Planning of the IVT under the leadership of Prof. Kay Axhausen contributes to these goals through the observation, measurement, description, modelling and evaluation of spatial behaviour, especially transport behaviour. Prominent examples of current and recently finished research projects are a continuous 6-week travel diary survey, a statedresponse survey concerning the acceptability of and willingness to pay for road pricing in Switzerland, a benchmark study about the geography of social networks, the Swiss National Transport Model and an agent-based micro-simulation model for Switzerland with MATSim, a software developed at the IVT and the Chair for Transport System Planning (VSP) at Technical University of Berlin. The chair collaborates with various national and international
partners for the funding of its research activities. Amongst these partners are Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), the Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI), the Swiss Association of Transport Engineers, the Swiss Association of Road and Transportation Experts, the Swiss Federal Roads Authority and EU framework programs.
Role in the project
The main responsibility of the IVT will be the processing and behavioural interpretation of the location data. This includes the cleaning and filtering of the traces, trip and activity detection, mode identification and the imputation of trip purposes. The basis for this will be the software for GPS processing developed at the IVT in recent years. Currently, the software is employed in the project “COST TU 0603 Busses with high levels of service” and undergoing a thorough review process using prompted-recall information by the respondents, who are asked to check, confirm and correct the results of the processing routines. The experiences gained from this project and various travel diary collections conducted with active and passive survey techniques as well as activity scheduling mechanisms and the relationship between land-use and travel behaviour will provide a valuable knowledge base for the project.
Key Personnel
Prof. Dr. Kay W. Axhausen is Full Professor for Transport Planning at the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems (IVT) of ETH Zürich. He has been involved in the measurement and modelling of travel behaviour for the last 30. His group of 20 researchers is active in agent-based micro-simulation, land use modelling, data collection (revealed and stated preferences), choice modelling and aggregate transport modelling. Especially his experience, knowledge and the results from his work with GPS data in various projects will be helpful at many points of the proposed project.
Dr. Nadine Schüssler studied Industrial Engineering and Business Administration at the University of Karlsruhe. She has been working at the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems for 6 years and has been involved in several projects during as a research assistant. A major focus of her dissertation on accounting for similarities between discrete choice alternatives derived from high-resolution observations of transport behaviour was the development of processing routines for person-based GPS observations, including data cleaning and the detection of activities, trips and their transport modes. Since mid 2010 she is a senior researcher at the institute and coordinates research projects on GPS processing and the agent-based microsimulation MATSim. Kay and Nadine will be responsible for WP 4 (Automated Travel Mode and Trip Purpose Detection).
