Dynamic Trip Modelling

From Shopping Centres to the Internet

By: Robert G. V. Baker

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eText | 5 August 2006

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The thesis of this book is that there are one set of equations that can define any trip between an origin and destination. The idea originally came from work that I did when applying the hydrodynamic analogy to study congested traffic flows in 1981. However, I was disappointed to find out that much of the mathematical work had already been done decades earlier. When I looked for a new application, I realised that shopping centre demand could be like a longitudinal wave, governed by centre opening and closing times. Further, a solution to the differential equation was the gravity model and this suggested that time was somehow part of distance decay. This was published in 1985 and represented a different approach to spatial interaction modelling. The next step was to translate the abstract theory into something that could be tested empirically. To this end, I am grateful to my Ph. D supervisor, Professor Barry Garner who taught me that it is not sufficient just to have a theoretical model. This book is an outcome of this on-going quest to look at how the evolution of the model performs against real world data. This is a far more difficult process than numerical simulations, but the results have been more valuable to policy formulation, and closer to what I think is spatial science. The testing and application of the model required the compilation of shopping centre surveys and an Internet data set.