MP4A project: mobility planning for Africa

This project aims to create a tool that uses mobile phone transaction (trajectory) data that will be able to address transportation related challenges, thus allowing promotion and facilitation of sustainable urban mobility planning in Third World countries. The proposed tool is a transport demand model for Ivory Coast, with emphasis on its major urbanization Abidjan. The consortium will bring together available data from the internet, and integrate these with the mobility data obtained from the mobile phones in order to build the best possible transport model. A transport model allows an understanding of current and future infrastructure requirements in Ivory Coast. As such, this project will provide the first proof of concept. In this context, long-term analysis of individual call traces will be performed to reconstruct systematic movements, and to infer an origin-destination matrix. A similar process will be performed using the locations of caller and recipient of phone calls, enabling the comparison of socio-economic ties vs. mobility. The emerging links between different areas will be used to build an effective map to optimize regional border definitions and road infrastructure from a mobility perspective. Finally, we will try to build specialized origin-destination matrices for specific categories of population. Such categories will be inferred from data through analysis of calling behaviours, and will also be used to characterize the population of different cities. The project also includes a study of data compliance with distributions of standard measures observed in literature, including distribution of calls, call durations and call network features.