Geo-temporal tracking and analysis of tourist movement

Agent-based simulation is a decision support tool that has recently been used by park managers to better plan the development of tourist infrastructure such as paths, buildings and viewing platforms and to understand the relationships between visitor flows and acceptable levels of crowding. The objective in these studies is to simulate the current and projected movement of individuals in relationship to pedestrian infrastructure or management actions to determine the impact on visitor experience and infrastructure capacity. A number of projects have been undertaken in Australia and the United States using agent-based models. However, research has shown that there is a need for new methods to collect calibration and validation data in order to validate spatial/temporal simulation models. This paper presents the results of experiments designed to track humans at the Twelve Apostles National Park, Victoria, Australia over 3 days in an effort to develop typologies of trip itineraries. The research used running race timing equipment known as the Alge timing system to monitor the movement of people in the park along a constrained network. A series of receivers recorded the precise positions of 900 individuals who were wearing unobtrusive ankle transmitters. This paper examines the technical aspects of tracking humans using race-timing technology and proposes some methods to analyse this data to determine whether typologies of tourist behaviour do indeed exist. The research also comments on the utility of the data to address the requirements of the recreational behaviour simulator, an agent-based modeling framework which has been used extensively for national park management.