Measuring people's mobility and presence using ICT – MobiTIC

Current approaches in official statistics, urban planning and transportation for measuring the presence of population at a given place in time, their mobility and land use are traditionally based on single-source data, such as census, surveys, traffic counts, etc., possibly integrated with geospatial information (maps, satellite imagery, space occupancy, etc.). These sources give the illusion of static spatial structures as they only provide punctual description of the phenomenon they measure.
Digital data open up fundamental perspectives for the dynamic analysis of territories, at finer levels of geographical and temporal accuracy, and may provide actors with the potential to manage their resources more efficiently, which is a requirement for a sustainable development of the territories. The extracted information can thus enrich mobility and presence models, by labelling travellers’ origins and destinations with frequency and time information, as well as by assigning one or multiple goals to the associated movements.
By exploiting such massive data, breakthroughs are expected in terms of a more flexible, adapted and higher-quality offer of services and infrastructures in the field of tourism, emergency and health-risk management, water supply, waste collection and treatment, mobility services and transportation. However, single-source data are partial and biased, and their ability to grasp complex urban phenomena is therefore reduced. The joint usage of multiple sources of digital (e.g., mobile phone, ticketing) and traditional data (e.g., census data, maps, etc.) will make it possible to fully take advantage of the strengths of each different type of source and overcome their inner individual limitations and biases.
MobiTIC has its foundation in the desire for close collaboration among the actors in order to define, develop and implement a finer-grained methodology to collect and exploit mobile phone network signalling data joined with other digital and traditional data sources (smart card, surveys, GPS data, etc.). MobiTIC’s methodology shall produce novel models, analyses and indicators of presence and mobility that are relevant, reliable, compliant with privacy rules, representative and frequently updated. These indicators shall be produced at the finest spatial and temporal resolutions in order to support the decisions of local actors towards the sustainable development of territories and to open new research opportunities on both spatial and social dynamics. MobiTIC builds on the 2019 strategic priorities of the French State, which are at the interface between human and social sciences and artificial intelligence.
As a first output, MobiTIC aims to produce dynamic population maps at several spatial scales over the territory. This mapping of population presence and mobility will be used to characterize geographical areas, to differentiate the uses of the space by groups, to measure the effects of social and territorial inequalities, thus allowing to zoom on specific groups/areas of interest in public action (priority neighbourhoods of the city, peri-urban areas, city centers, peripheral polarities). The functional organization of the urban systems described via this new kind of information will lead to new models and will be compared to existing zoning systems in order to make them evolve.
As a second output, MobiTIC aims to provide mobility indicators at higher frequency than surveys to permit a continuous follow-up of the changes in people mobility and to drive sustainable policies from public actors, which aim to influence them.
The proposed spatio-temporal indicators will be used to measure the impact of events on mobility practices and will lead to the development of a decision-support tool for public policy evaluation (based on multi-agent systems) allowing for ex-ante simulation-based evaluations. The city of Rennes will be the area of interest for the studies on mobility proposed in the project.