An Approach for the Estimation of Aggregate Potential Telecommuting Demand

Abstract

Development of technology has made possible the invention of innovative and modern methods to solve partially the problems caused by traffic congestion, through decreasing the need for physical transportation; one such method being telecommuting. Few predictions have been reported regarding its aggregate demand at the level of a city, generally because of the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the subject. In this paper, an approach for the estimation of potential telecommuting demand is proposed and applied for the city of Tehran, using a 3-level generalization process to compensate for the incompleteness of the unattainable vast and expensive data. In the first level of the proposed approach, the matrix of average potential telecommuting demand for 36 job categories is derived. In the second level, the data of 14 percent of the government employees are collected, in the third level, the geographic distribution of all governmental employees with telecommuting potential is determined. Results show that 53,898 out of 148,551 government employees are able to participate in telecommuting programs on a daily basis, removing 53,898 peak hour work trips on a daily basis. Although based on rather strong assumptions, forced by the limitation of data, the approach is implemented for Tehran.