TIL/T&P Masterclass presentation by PhD student Mignon van den Berg on her research and on choosing a graduation project. 15 March 2012

1. Everscape
3D Multi-User Virtual Environment for Data Collection
on Travel Choice Behaviour in Case of a Tsunami
15-03-2012 Mignon van den Berg
Delft
University of
Technology
Challenge the future

2. Introduction
Masterclass TIL/T&P
• Graduation project TIL
• PhD project
• Everscape
• Discussion
Masterclass 2

3. Graduation project TIL
Background information
• Bachelor: Industrial Design Engineering
• Master: Transport, Infrastructure and
Logistics
• Graduated in: September 2009
• Title: Pedestrian Interaction Behaviour
and its Relation to Doorway Capacity
Masterclass 3

4. Graduation project TIL
Why this topic and why at TU Delft?
Why this topic?
• Technical, more policy related, behaviour, or a combination?
• What do I find interesting courses / topics?
• Any topic in particular? For me: pedestrians
• Who do I want in my committee?
• Pedestrian experiments
à ask and look around!
Why at TU Delft?
• I already did an internship
• Do I want to do a PhD or not?
Masterclass 4

5. PhD project
Travel Behaviour Modelling under Exceptional Conditions
Why do a PhD project?
• Royal Haskoning
• Interesting topic
• Started in November 2010
Travel choices people make during for example natural disasters
Process:
• First year: literature study and research proposal
• Now: development of Everscape
• Later this year: final data collection to develop choice models
Masterclass 5

6. Everscape
Who, what and why?
Who developed it?
• PrendingerLab (National Institute of
Informatics, Tokyo, Japan)
• Helmut Prendinger, Eurico Doirado
• Transport & Planning (Civil Engineering,
TU Delft)
• Serge Hoogendoorn, Hans van Lint, myself
What is it?
• 3D multi-user virtual or serious gaming
environment
Masterclass 6

7. Everscape
Who, what and why?
Data collection methods:
1. Stated preference:
• Hypothetical situation
• Is this what people do in reality?
2. Revealed preference:
• Actual situation
• Hard to reconstruct the actual situation
Why has it been developed?
• New data collection method
• Detailed trajectory and event data
• Virtual experiment in combination with survey afterwards
Masterclass 7

8. Everscape
The experiment
‘Goal’ participants:
• Going to an island to see a concert
What will happen:
• They arrive by helicopter
• Then they drive to the concert by car
• During the concert: earth quake and
tsunami
• In order to survive: evacuate!
Masterclass 8

9. Everscape
Evacuate
long
route
heliport train
short
route
bridge
concert
tsunami
Masterclass 9

10. Everscape
First experiments
• TRB: January 24
• PLATOS: March 14
Movie
Masterclass 10

11. Everscape
TRB Experiment – some results
• Two sessions: 16
and 30 participants
• Most people chose
train and long route
• 6 people died, 5 of
them were women
• Those who chose to
run did not survive
Most important: the
method provides us
opportunities to collect
travel behaviour data!
Masterclass 11

12. Everscape
The coming year
• Improve data collection method!
• Think about the following aspects:
• Realism
• Information provision
• Group/household behaviour: group participation
• Herding: include bots (‘extra people’)
• Final data collection: September/October
Masterclass 12

13. Questions / Discussion
Tips for choosing your graduation project:
• You can consider it as a test to find out
what you want to do after your graduation
• You really need to like the topic and also
consider what type of work / activities you
want to do (e.g. data collection, modelling)
• Decide who you want / don’t want in your
committee, especially who you want as
For questions:
your daily supervisor
Mignon van den Berg
m.vandenberg@tudelft.nl
• Ask and look around
Room 4.40
Masterclass 13