Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
524817 Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 2016 20 Pages PDF
Abstract

•Dynamic Origin–Destination flows are a key input for traffic modelling and policy making.•A benchmarking framework for comparison of OD estimation algorithms is proposed.•Considerably different approaches in a variety of settings/conditions can be tested.•The platform, available to interested parties upon request, is described and illustrated.•Applications to both off-line/planning and on-line algorithms are presented.

Estimation/updating of Origin–Destination (OD) flows and other traffic state parameters is a classical, widely adopted procedure in transport engineering, both in off-line and in on-line contexts. Notwithstanding numerous approaches proposed in the literature, there is still room for considerable improvements, also leveraging the unprecedented opportunity offered by information and communication technologies and big data. A key issue relates to the unobservability of OD flows in real networks – except from closed highway systems – thus leading to inherent difficulties in measuring performance of OD flows estimation/updating methods and algorithms. Starting from these premises, the paper proposes a common evaluation and benchmarking framework, providing a synthetic test bed, which enables implementation and comparison of OD estimation/updating algorithms and methodologies under “standardized” conditions. The framework, implemented in a platform available to interested parties upon request, has been flexibly designed and allows comparing a variety of approaches under various settings and conditions. Specifically, the structure and the key features of the framework are presented, along with a detailed experimental design for the application of different dynamic OD flow estimation algorithms. By way of example, applications to both off-line/planning and on-line algorithms are presented, together with a demonstration of the extensibility of the presented framework to accommodate additional data sources.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computer Science Applications
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