Estimation of Origin-Destination using Mobile Phone Call Data: A Case Study of Greater Dhaka, Bangladesh

The information regarding zonal interchange or origin-destination (OD) data plays vital role in planning of transport infrastructure. Traditionally these data are acquired based on household interview survey, road side interview, socioeconomic attributes and census data which are costly in terms of money, time and logistics. This research is conducted to identify the substantial potential of mobile phone call data to estimate the population of each zone and estimate origin-destination trips between each zone as alternative for the traditional methods of collecting origin-destination data. This research is based on two different methods for estimating commuting trips, which are recurring trips between persons home location to work location, and sequential travel flow, which are combined form of work and non-work trips. Commuting trips-based OD are generated based on one-month aggregated data whereas, sequential travel flowbased OD is generated for daily or weekly temporal windows. Furthermore, an expansion factor is calculated to upscale the OD flows for each zone based on estimated home location of user and population census data. The results are compared and correlated with secondary household survey interview OD data, which concluded that frequent mobile phone can be used to estimate travel flow of large percentage of population more regularly and with reduced cost.