An open data-driven approach for travel demand synthesis: an application to São Paulo

Abstract

This paper presents a synthetic travel demand for the Greater São Paulo Metropolitan Region of Brazil, entirely based on open data and representative of the observed travel demand. The open-source and extendable pipeline creates a path from raw data to the synthetic travel demand and, further, to the downstream agent-based mobility simulation. An advantage of this approach is that it enables the reproduction of the synthetic travel demand and, therefore, provides the foundation of repeatability of downstream studies. Furthermore, as the methodology is based on open data, the study’s outcomes are easily accessible to the broad research and practice-oriented community.