Work Group 12: Assessment and Evaluation

Objectives

The aims of this work package are to:

• Design a means of evaluating the performance of the statistical methods and software developed in the project, in the case study application in London and Zurich
• To undertake an evaluation of the pilot applications, using this methodology.

Description of work

This work package will provide an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of the methods in a practical application. It will concentrate on validation of results and examine the extent to which the results represent an improvement on previous methods.

In particular, validation will concentrate on:

• The extent to which component sub-models have been fitted by the methods employed
• The errors inherent in the combination of data from different sources
• Examination of global indicators, such as journey length distributions
• Observable validation results with respect to the data to be fitted (traffic flows and passenger movements), including data used in the process and independent data
• The separability of the validation and whether sampling from the results proves the stability of the approach.

Although the main part of the evaluation work will be concentrated in the final year (reflecting the timing of the case studies), evaluation will be an ongoing activity throughout the project. In particular, we have made financial provision in the proposal for the external peer review of key technical documents and to engage the services of an evaluator. Oxford Systematics (Australia) are acting as External Evaluators to the project, providing independent reviews but also contributing to the direction and thinking of the project.