Modelling long-distance route choice using mobile phone call detail record data: A case study of Senegal

The growing mobile phone penetration rates have led to the emergence of large-scale call detail records (CDRs) that could serve as a low-cost data source for travel behaviour modelling. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study evaluating the potential of CDR data in the context of route choice behaviour modelling. Being event-driven, the data are discontinuous and only able to yield partial trajectories, thus presenting serious challenges for route identification. This paper proposes techniques for inferring the users' chosen routes or subsets of their likely routes from partial CDR trajectories, as well as data fusion with external sources of information such as route costs, and then adapts the broad choice framework to the current modelling scenario. The model results show that CDR data can capture the expected travel behaviour and the derived values of travel time are found to be realistic for the study area.