# Modeling Activity-Time to Build Realistic Plannings in Population Synthesis in a Suburban Area
## 7 Urban Experiment
### Experimental Results  
A comparison between the output of our model and the reference \(ENTD\) distributions is presented in Figures 27 and 28. Figure 27 plots the distribution of durations: we can see, for example, that _education_ occupation typically takes 3 h or 8 h, with two modes at these durations. The first mode represents students with half a day of lessons, and the second is the duration of courses for a full day at school. _Work_ has two main duration modes: the first mode is around 4 h;  
Figure 26: Comparison of time estimation error of the different configurations. (**Left**): at the end-time level, the configurations have almost the same activity-error value for restaurant, leisure, and shopping; the differences are at work and education activities, with an advantage belonging to (C), then to (E) and (B). (**Right**): at the duration-level, larger differences appear; configuration (D) is better than the others, followed by (A), (F), and (E). A compromise has to be made on these two criteria: configuration (E) shows the best trade-off between duration and end-time. this mode represents an agent who works for a half of the day, while the second mode is between 8 and 9 h and represents an agent who performs a full day of work. _Leisure_ has several modes: first, there are agents who spend a short leisure duration (5 to 15 min), mainly, for these agents, going for a walk and staying for a short period in the nearest park; the second part is agents who perform for 15 to 35 min and who go to the park in the morning or in the evening of a weekday; the remaining agents perform for a longer duration (more than 45 min) and are often parents who go to a larger park with their children, especially on the weekend. _Restaurant_ has a typical duration of one hour. Overall, activity-durations are well-fitted: for all activities the distribution of activities' duration output by the algorithm is similar to its reference \(ENTD\) distributions. Figure 28 shows the time when an activity typically ends. According to the input census, employees usually finish work at noon if they work a half day or between 17 and 19 h for those working a full day. Teachers end at 12 h in the morning and 16 h 30 in the afternoon. Many leisure and shopping occupations end at 17 h. Shopping is more frequent in the morning, probably due to groceries errands. Lunch usually finishes by 13 h 30, while a dinner ends after 21 h.  
Times of _Work_ and _Education_ are correctly modeled with some minor exceptions at peak hours, as the two modes' half-day and full-day are closely fitted. However, the approach has some difficulties fitting the input data of secondary activities:  
* _Shopping_ distribution is underestimated in the morning and at lunch time (from 9 h to 12 h), mainly because shopping trips to the bakery or at lunchtime are not considered. In the evening, the shopping time distribution is over-estimated: first, the construction of the activity-plan (where shopping is a secondary activity) is mainly attached to agents who perform a primary activity (work or education), which restricts the horizon time for shopping to only the evening time. Secondly, shopping has a large distribution time from 7 h to 22 h, which will give more freedom for agents to perform shopping later in the day, while in France, the large shopping areas close between 19 h to 21 h, and only small areas are still open until 22 h. At the national scale, part of the population does shopping activity once per week and in large shopping areas, while in the catchment area, the people have tend to shop in the local small areas. Restricting the closing time of shopping places to 19 or 20 h can considerably reduce the number of observations from ENTD (the proposed approach's training data), which will affect the performance of the proposed approach. * _Leisure_ distribution is overestimated at the end of the day due to the direct impact of performing the primary activities early in the day, which implies a delay in the start of leisure activity.