From Physical Properties of Transportation Flows to Demand Estimation: An Optimization Approach

Dimitris Bertsimas () and Julia Yan ()
Additional contact information
Dimitris Bertsimas: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139; Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Julia Yan: Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Transportation Science, 2018, vol. 52, issue 4, 1002-1011

Abstract: Efficient management of transportation systems requires accurate trip demand data. It is sometimes possible to track anonymized users through their commutes, accomplished through previous studies on smart cards, license plates, and mobile phones. However, frequently the main public transit data sources are in aggregated forms such as entry and exit counts, and one must recover the original demand from these aggregated counts. Such problems are generally underspecified. To address this, we present an optimization framework to recover origin–destination matrices under minimal assumptions, incorporating reasonable physical constraints such as flow conservation, smoothness, and symmetry. The proposed method is evaluated and shows strong (∼5%–10%) improvement in R 2 over the maximum entropy method on a variety of real-world data sets from Boston, New York City, and San Francisco, comprising tens to hundreds of stations.

Keywords: demand estimation; transportation; optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2017.0802 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:52:y:2018:i:4:p:1002-1011

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().