Modeling travel demand over a period of one week: The mobiTopp model

When mobiTopp was initially designed, more than 10 years ago, it has been the first travel demand simulation model intended for an analysis period of one week. However, the first version supported only an analysis period of one day. This paper describes the lessons learned while extending the simulation period from one day to one week. One important issue is ensuring realistic start times of activities. Due to differences between the realized trip durations during the simulation and the trip durations assumed when creating the activity schedule, the realized activity schedule and the planned activity schedule may deviate from each other at some point in time during simulation. A suitable rescheduling strategy is needed to prevent this. Another issue is the different behavior at weekends, when more joint activities take place than on weekdays, resulting in an increased share of trips made using the mode car as passenger. If a mode choice model that takes availability of ride-sharing opportunities into account is used, it can be difficult to reproduce the correct modal split without modeling explicitly these joint activities. When modeling travel demand for a week, it is also important to account for infrequent long-distance trips. While the share of these trips is low, the total number is not negligible. It seems that these long-distance trips are not well covered by the destination choice model used for the day-to-day trips, indicating the need for a long-distance trip model of infrequent events.