Estimating Origin-Destination flows using opportunistically collected mobile phone location data from one million users in Boston Metropolitan Area

In this paper, we present an algorithm for the analysis of opportunistically collected mobile phone location data to estimate a population’s travel demand in terms of origins and destinations of individual trips. Aggregating the trips from millions individual mobile phone users in the Boston Metropolitan area, we show that the estimated Origin-Destination flows correlate well with the US Census estimates at both the county and census tract levels. Moreover, compared to traditional census survey data, our estimations allow capturing weekday and weekend patterns as well as seasonal variations. These features could make methods for Origin-Destination flow estimation based on opportunistically collected mobile phone location data a critical component for transportation management and emergency response.