Abstract Manager

Background

The Ministry of Transportation for Ontario (MTO) uses an integrated, multimodal passenger and freight forecasting model for the province to aid in long-range planning and to support various applications such as corridor-level highway planning and design, highway project prioritization and modal studies. This model – termed Transportation and Regional Economic Simulation of Ontario, TRESO – is a multimodal macroscopic model, used to forecast travel demand throughout the province of Ontario.

This model connects five key components, namely: a macroeconomic model that is spatially disaggregated, person travel models dealing with urban as well as inter-urban/long-distance travel by residents and visitors, a freight model that deals with commodity flows by main modes of rail, marine, intermodal and truck flows on the road, and the underlying “supply-side” common element of the transportation network.

Scope

The focus of this paper will be “model validation”, which is a process through which model outputs for the base year are compared with observed data to gauge how well a model represents the reality. This paper will discuss the details of validation of different components of the TRESO model, data requirements to perform such validation, while highlighting the data gaps. The paper will also provide a brief overview of state-of-practice in large-regional model validation process among state/province-wide models in North America. The analysis will focus on the following key areas:

• validation of modeled road network volumes versus traffic count and potential use of GPS data for compare network performance;
• long-distance rail passenger demand compared to rail ridership data; and
• urban transit travel demand compared to transit ridership data for major urban areas of Ontario.

Conclusion

The paper will conclude with key observations from the analysis and potential areas of improvements in future model re-calibration and validation exercises.