Sustainable mobility and user preferences by crowdsourcing data: the Open Agora project

One application of network optimization is the study of the policies able to change people habits in transportation mode selection. The main strategy for achieving this objective is to develop a model describing the preferences of the people by considering the characteristics of the transportation modes (such as cost, travel duration) and then to develop policies in order to improve the characteristics of the target transportation mode. These models are called utility models and have a long story. Nevertheless, the data needed for their fitting are difficult to get. One of the main issues in this case is how to collect the data and how to tune a model that can be easily scaled and adapted to different settings. In this paper, we describe the results achieved during the Open Agora project where the utility model is tined with crowdsourcing data coming from mobile phone applications and collected indirectly by the users.