Transportation - UHasselt

Each day, millions of people go to work and to school, go shopping, or simply relax. Consequently, within the domain of transportation, IMOB mainly focuses on research into transportation behaviour. We also focus on policy evaluation.

Transportatioin behaviour 

Reports from various international organizations show that the importance of traffic and transport is increasing. This is also caused by urbanization and globalization, which results in increased global trade and passenger traffic. To map this increase, long-term investments are needed. Another reason is that governments cannot afford to let transport limitations have a negative impact on the future competitiveness of their products and services. To achieve better long-term decisions, we can use traffic and transport models. On an international level, the activity-based transportation models are the standard for modelling transportation behaviour. IMOB also largely focuses its transportation research on activity-based approaches to study and model transportation behaviour. Automated systems are developed for the collection of activity data to support dynamic modelling of transportation behaviour.
The main characteristic of activity-based transport models is that the transportation behaviour of persons or families is derived from the activities they want or have to do. So, trips are no longer seen as an isolated fact in these models. This is a great advantage over classic models. Activity-based transportation models lead to more realistic and well-founded policy predictions. The advantages of these models are that we can more realistically describe the transportation behaviour of persons and better understand their transportation behaviour. 

Policy evaluation 

By analyzing models of transport data, we can predict future developments in transportation behaviour and assess the impact of policy measures. As a result, research into policy evaluation is tied to research into transportation behaviour, but the research line of policy evaluation also produces supplemental scientific support for the specific questions of policy-makers (for example, the evaluation of bicycle and parking policy, research into multimodality, and the development of new decision-making instruments).

Research topics within the domain of transportation 

• Activity-based transportation models 
• Congestion
• Environmental impact of transportation behaviour 
• Route tracking through GPS
• Development of decision-making instruments 
• Multimodality

Contact person

Prof. dr. Davy Janssens, programme leader transportation