Journal of Korean Society of Transportation ISSN:1229-1366(Print) 2234-4217(Online) 대한교통학회지

Recently, mobile phone data was applied in travel demand modeling as a new source of dynamic population movement. This study is also aimed to estimate "occupancy population" during a given period of time within a given spatial region using mobile phone data. An occupancy population was defined as the number of people residing or moving within a given time and space. In case of Seoul Metropolitan area, we divided the area into a number of administrative districts as zones for analysis and estimated the occupancy population of each zone by mobile phone data collected by SK telecom Co., a wireless telecommunication provider in Korea. For the expansion of mobile phone data, a new concept of "communication probability" was introduced and applied in the estimation of occupancy population of each zone by the hour. We compared the estimated number with the daytime population and the daytime population index referred by the Statistics Korea. The results showed that a positive correlation existed between the estimated number and the statistical number by nationwide survey. It was concluded that mobile phone data could be more cost-effective sources than a conventional survey method to estimate the pattern of population movement by the hour or by the day.