Optimising the Use of Partial Information in Urban and Regional Systems

OPUS mid-project Technical Workshop

The European Commission OPUS project will hold a technical workshop alongside the Association for European Transport annual meeting to be held in Strasbourg. The workshop will take place from 2.00-5.30 pm on Sunday 2 October 2005. The workshop aims to present the innovative OPUS methodology to expert technical professionals, to validate the theory and to obtain feedback to help the project achieve its objectives. Attendance will be by invitation, but interested specialists are welcome to apply. If you would like to be invited, please apply to the Project Coordinator, John Polak. Attendance will be limited to 20 people.

More about OPUS

OPUS is a large information management research project, supported by Eurostat as part of the European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. The overall aim of the OPUS project is to enable the coherent combination and use of data from disparate, cross-sectoral sources, and so contribute to improved decision making in the public and private sector within Europe. The research is focused on developing an innovative methodology, incorporating statistical and database systems. Transport planning is a prominent example of a topic that uses multiple sources of data, and will be the main test case for OPUS, but the cross-sectoral nature of the research will be demonstrated through the inclusion of an application in the field of health information as another example.

To meet the needs for comprehensive information on socio-economic systems such as urban and regional transport planning, and in the health services sector, data from diverse sources (e.g. conventional sample surveys, census records, operational data streams and data generated by IST systems themselves) must be combined. There is currently no appropriate developed methodology that enables the combination of complex spatial, temporal and real time data in a statistically coherent fashion. The aim of the project is to develop, apply and evaluate such a methodology.

Combining different types of (often inevitably biased) data sources to improve estimation and reduce bias is a difficult but possible task. OPUS is set up to use Bayesian approaches to a range of transport and health services sector example applications.

OPUS is developing a general statistical framework for combining diverse data sources and specialising this framework to estimate indicators of mobility such as travel patterns over space and time for different groups of people. The project has pilot and feasibility study applications in London, Zurich, Milan, and on a national level in Belgium. Methods for extending the framework to information aspects of the health domain will also be investigated.

The benefits of OPUS will be:

• Improved estimation of detailed travel demand, using all available information;
• Avoidance of simplified combination of data that can give erroneous estimates;
• Indicators of data quality, to provide guidance for new data collection;
• A framework for managing data from rolling survey programmes;
• Better understanding of the role of variability and uncertainty in results and models;
• Avoidance of confusion from different, apparently conflicting, estimates of the same quantity;
• A generalised methodology for other domains of interest.

July 2005