Development of a Temporal Extension to Query Travel Behavior Time Paths Using an Object-Oriented GIS

An essential requirement to better understand activity-based travel behavior (ABTB) at the disaggregate level is the development of a spatio-temporal model able to support queries related to activities of individuals or groups of individuals. This paper describes the development and implementation of a temporal extension to a geographic information system (GIS) object-oriented model for the modeling of the time path and the retrieval of its event chaining. In this approach, time path is formulated as a totally time ordered set composed by activity events and trip events, themselves organized into time ordered sets. As sets, the time path and its components can be searched using their respective indexes. A series of methods were built that implement temporal predicates as an interface to temporally query the database. A set of positional operator methods were also designed that transform temporal topological queries into retrieval functions based on set ordering indices. Taken together, the temporal predicates and the positional operator methods define a temporal query extension that meets the retrieval needs of an ABTB database.