Typologie des chaînes de déplacements et modélisation descriptive des systèmes d'activités des personnes

Individual travel behaviours has been the focus of multiple studies for several years. Nevertheless, it is still not easy to draw the real picture of citizens' mobility. Indeed, trips are constantly becoming more complex due to urban sprawl, fragmentation of activity, increasing motorisation of the population, and specific population segments such as the elderly, or any others category of users. In addition, the diversification of transportation alternatives (new modes) is providing increased travel flexibility for most of the population. The analytical methods have also evolved over time as well, trying to improve the understanding of population mobility. Activity-based models are emerging from these new methods. These models allow to obtain disaggregated results using travel surveys of the population. Since 1976, the Greater Montreal Area has been gathering many databases on citizens' trips. Indeed, a telephone survey, called "Enquête Origine-Destination", is conducted every five years to collect information on the travel behaviours of approximately 5% of the residing population. As of today, several studies have focused on travels from these databases. However, for a better understanding of travel behaviours in Montreal, it is necessary to analyse all trips made by a person during an entire day. In fact, a trip to an activity is likely to influence on a secondary trip to another activity in the same day. Therefore, the analysis of trip chains becomes more significant to understand the behaviour of the population in the end. Many worldwide studies have already addressed trip chains. Moreover, several authors, such as McGuckin and Murakami (1995), Goulias and Kitamura (1989), Primerano et al. (2007), have contributed to define trip chains. Although definitions shortly differ according to authors, the main base remains the same, that is aggregation of activities while traveling. In addition, the authors have overlooked the trip chains based on length, duration, amount of trips, according to some socio-demographic characteristics such as gender and age, households' size, car's access and several other criterias.