Developing transport interaction macromodels to simulate traffic patterns : Case of Oslo, Norway

Sammanfattning: Predicting the passenger flow inside a city is a vital component of the intelligent transportation management system. The proposal for a new residential area, an office space, post­pandemic policy implications for work from home, behavioral changes for revised traffic patterns, infrastructural improvements, require a visual and analytical backing which can be provided through a macro simulation model. This research explores the performance of the Machine learning (ML) based transport model against the predictions provided by the traditional Spatial Interaction Models (SIM) for the city of Oslo. The transport models and their parameters are analyzed for sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis to derive city character. Furthermore, the derived model is deployed over an interactive dashboard for analytical and their practical visualizations through infographics. The results show that the ML model outperforms the SIM. Although the traditional SIM has a clear advantage of being interpreted by design and requiring a few parameters, it suffers from its inability to accurately capture the structure of real flows and greater variability as compared to the ML model. Extensive statistical analyses are conducted to obtain significant results and realize the pros and cons of both the models which question the validity of results for the ML model over SIM. With this thesis, we discuss the potential of ML model detected trends of passenger flows, andtheir capacity to simulate city development­related scenarios for the traffic flows within the city.