Since its opening on April 13th, the World Expo 2025, Osaka, Japan (Osaka-Kansai Expo.) has been bustling with visitors from Japan and abroad every day. Many private companies are providing free support to the operation of the venue as suppliers of equipment and services. PACIFIC CONSULTANTS is also providing technology for human flow analysis using big data. We spoke with Tominori TOKIDA, General Manager of DX Business Promotion Dept. Digital Service Div., about what can be learned from this human flow analysis and how it can be used in the future.
INDEX
- Request for technology provision received from the association
- Presenting the first detailed analysis of who arrived and left the venue and how they did it
- Expected role in calculating future economic ripple effects
- Understanding and analyzing human flow as big data will lead to regional revitalization
Request for technology provision received from the association
The decision to hold the Osaka-Kansai Expo was made officially at General Meeting the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) in November 2018. Since then, PACIFIC CONSULTANTS has been commissioned to carry out a variety of tasks, including the basic design of the overall landscape and pavilions for the Expo site, studies on the second phase of urban development at Yumeshima, and support for human flow simulation within the Expo site. We are currently supporting transportation demand management (TDM), but at the same time, we are also providing technology related to human flow analysis. It all began with a casual conversation with the Expo Association, the organizer of the event.
"It was the fall of the year before the event," TOKITA recalls.
"It was when we were introducing 'Nation-wide Movement Statistics,'a human flow statistical data service jointly developed by PACIFIC CONSULTANTS and SoftBank, at Tourism EXPO Japan 2024. At the venue, we proposed that analyzing human flow big data would enable the consideration of new evidence-based tourism strategies. The association became interested in the human flow statistics that form the basis of the service and asked us to become a sponsoring company and provide the technology. After discussing this with SoftBank, our co-developer, we decided that this would provide a track record of analyzing human flow big data at a large-scale event like an international exposition, and that we would be able to contribute as a private company to the success of the Osaka-Kansai Expo. We were happy to offer technical support."
PACIFIC CONSULTANTS then signed a contract with the Expo Association as one of the private suppliers to provide services related to the operation of the Games. They decided to use the Nation-wide Movement Statistics to analyze human flow and compile a report.
<Nation-wide Movement Statistics>
"Nation-wide Movement Statistics" is a human flow statistical data service that combines the human flow analysis and traffic engineering technology and know-how that PACIFIC CONSULTANTS has cultivated with big data (fully anonymized) location information data of tens of millions of mobile devices by attribute obtained from SoftBank's base stations. The service is provided by SoftBank. The name and logo of "Nation-wide Movement Statistics" are trademarks of SoftBank.
By combining the usage status of various transportation methods estimated from location information with statistical data such as population, it is possible to provide highly accurate data on mobility, expanding to an estimated nationwide population of 120 million. Visualizing human's movements can contribute to solving social issues and revitalizing industry through urban planning and development, disaster prevention measures, restaurant opening plans, revitalizing tourist destinations, and supporting the introduction of new mobility services such as self-driving buses. Due to the unprecedented precision of the analytical data it can provide, it won the Outstanding Technology Award at Construction Xross (C-Xross) 2021 Kanto held in 2021.
Presenting the first detailed analysis of who arrived and left the venue and how they did it
PACIFIC CONSULTANTS will use its "Nation-wide Movement Statistics" technology to provide statistical data on where Expo visitors came from, what means of transportation they used, and what means of transportation they used to go to after leaving the venue.
Previous surveys of large-scale events only provided a rough grasp of the total number of attendees at the venue and the number of people using nearby transportation. However, by using the "Nation-wide Movement Statistics," it is possible to obtain detailed information, while ensuring anonymity, about people of what attributes (age, gender) who live in what areas, where they traveled, and what means of transportation they used to get to the event, as well as when they returned. A major feature of the "Nation-wide Movement Statistics" is that it can grasp human's movements not as a total number, but as a specific flow by attributes, including travel routes and means of transportation. TOKIDA explains its significance as follows:
"There have been attempts to grasp trends in human flow rather than just the number of visitors. For example, one method would ask a certain number of people to fill out a survey and write down the routes they took. However, these methods had various problems, such as not being able to grasp the attributes of the people who were moving, not being able to reflect differences in days of the week or time of day, and expanding on a very small sample of data, making the figures obtained unreliable. Nation-wide Movement Statistics overcomes these limitations and makes precise analysis of human flow big data possible. The data provided this time is divided into time periods just before arriving at the Expo site and just after leaving the site, and the analysis period is limited to the Golden Week and Obon holidays in May, when large numbers of people are expected to visit. However, we were able to obtain very precise human flow data. The number of visitors to the Expo has been better than expected, so it is said that people are coming from a much wider area than just the Kinki region, and this is backed up by the data."
Visitors' place of residence and means of transportation: "Data reveals visitors from all over Japan"
Of the 1,718 cities and towns nationwide, visitors came from 1,390 cities and towns. It is clear that many used public transportation, but in the Shikoku area, the proportion of people traveling by car (including express buses) was higher.
Expected role in calculating future economic ripple effects
After such a large-scale event is over, it is essential to evaluate how much of an economic ripple effect it had, how accurate the predictions made before the event were, etc. TOKIDA says that human flow big data is extremely useful in this regard as well.
"Traditional methods for measuring economic ripple effects involve roughly estimating, for example, what percentage of visitors are residents of the prefecture and what percentage are from outside the prefecture, calculating the amount of spending at restaurants and transportation, and then conducting an input-output analysis to calculate how much production has increased across the economy as a whole. However, because the starting point for the calculation is the number of visitors from within and outside the prefecture, the figures derived are not very accurate. Furthermore, because only these estimated figures are available, event organizers are unable to confidently demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of their events, which we suspect may have led to reluctance to go ahead with the event. However, using the Nation-wide Movement Statistics reveals actual people's movements and even shows how many visitors stayed the night before. This makes it possible to specifically estimate how much transportation demand occurred and where, as well as how much money was spent on hotels and dinner. In addition, because it shows where people stopped off on the way home from the event, it also clarifies how much related spending occurred and where. This allows us to calculate economic ripple effects with unprecedented accuracy."
Certainly, if the economic ripple effects of various events become clearer, they will be accumulated as reference data, and the effects of holding them can be concretely grasped by analogy with events of a similar scale. Large-scale events are often criticized as "nuisance events" due to reasons such as "they cause congestion and traffic jams," "they incur excessive costs," and "they produce waste (in the case of fireworks displays, etc.)," but if it is possible to demonstrate the value they have for the local community and their concrete effects based on an analysis of human flow data, it will clearly make it easier for national and local governments hosting events to make policy decisions and reach consensus among residents.
Kansai Area Drop-ins by Residential Region: "What are the ripple effects of the Osaka-Kansai Expo?"
We visualized the destinations that visitors visited before and after the Osaka-Kansai Expo. We can see that they visited not only the Osaka-Kansai Expo, but also other areas within Osaka Prefecture.
It can be seen that many people visited the areas around Osaka Station, Shin-Osaka Station, and Namba, as well as the area around Itami Airport and the area north of the city leading to Kyoto. It can be inferred that the Expo has had a certain level of economic impact on the Kansai region.
Understanding and analyzing human flow as big data will lead to regional revitalization
TOKIDA says that the technical cooperation for the operation of this Expo has also served as an opportunity to expand the use of the Nation-wide Movement Statistics in Osaka. "The report on the human flow analysis related to the Expo has finished, but we plan to continue using the people flow big data for Osaka Prefecture, as well as other national and local governments and private companies.
For example, Osaka Prefecture, which is promoting its own smart city initiative, operates the Osaka Wide-area Data Collaboration Platform (ORDEN) as its data infrastructure. This is an attempt to promote the distribution and collaboration of various public and private data with the aim of improving convenience for prefectural residents and strengthening Osaka's urban competitiveness. One of these, the Open Data Platform in Osaka (ODPO), is already operational, and efforts are underway to develop and improve new products and services using the aggregated data. Osaka Prefecture requested that Nation-wide Movement Statistics be linked to ODPO, and at the same time, we are introducing what kind of human flow data statistical service it provides. We are also providing data to companies participating in a contest to use ODPO to come up with ideas for solving administrative issues, allowing them to use it as material for developing new services.
Furthermore, there is currently an increasing demand for the use of "Nation-wide Movement Statistics" not only for large-scale events, but also for private retailers and restaurant chains to conduct highly accurate analyses of potential locations for their stores, and TOKIDA says that there is a definite growing trend to use human flow statistical data services for market analysis and use them to develop more effective policies and plans. In fact, if traditional survey data is replaced with more precise data based on big data analysis, it is clear that national and local government policies and private company business plans can be made more accurate. PACIFIC CONSULTANTS hopes to increase the number of use cases and support the efforts of national and local governments and private companies.
