Estimating multi-year 24/7 origin-destination demand using high-granular multi-source traffic data
Wei Ma, Zhen, Qian
TL;DR
This paper tackles the challenge of estimating high-resolution origin-destination demand across many consecutive days and years. It introduces a data-driven framework that uses a dynamic assignment ratio (DAR) matrix, t-SNE plus k-means clustering to identify typical traffic patterns, a Logit-like route-choice model, and a GPU-accelerated stochastic projected gradient descent solver for high-dimensional NNLS problems. The approach is validated on a Sacramento regional network using 2014–2016 5-minute traffic counts and speeds, achieving good fit (average $R^2$ ≈ 0.87) and enabling 5-minute dynamic OD estimates over three years within hours on affordable hardware. The results reveal rich daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal patterns and demonstrate the framework's potential to support planning and reliability analyses with long-span, high-granularity data, while remaining open source for broader adoption.
Abstract
Dynamic origin-destination (OD) demand is central to transportation system modeling and analysis. The dynamic OD demand estimation problem (DODE) has been studied for decades, most of which solve the DODE problem on a typical day or several typical hours. There is a lack of methods that estimate high-resolution dynamic OD demand for a sequence of many consecutive days over several years (referred to as 24/7 OD in this research). Having multi-year 24/7 OD demand would allow a better understanding of characteristics of dynamic OD demands and their evolution/trends over the past few years, a critical input for modeling transportation system evolution and reliability. This paper presents a data-driven framework that estimates day-to-day dynamic OD using high-granular traffic counts and speed data collected over many years. The proposed framework statistically clusters daily traffic data into typical traffic patterns using t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and k-means methods. A GPU-based stochastic projected gradient descent method is proposed to efficiently solve the multi-year 24/7 DODE problem. It is demonstrated that the new method efficiently estimates the 5-minute dynamic OD demand for every single day from 2014 to 2016 on I-5 and SR-99 in the Sacramento region. The resultant multi-year 24/7 dynamic OD demand reveals the daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal and yearly change in travel demand in a region, implying intriguing demand characteristics over the years.