Doctoral thesis (Dissertations and theses)
Dynamic Origin-Destination Matrix Estimation with Interacting Demand Patterns
Cantelmo, Guido
2018
 

Files


Full Text
Cantelmo_Thesis_Orbit.pdf
Author preprint (6.41 MB)
Download

All documents in ORBilu are protected by a user license.

Send to



Details



Keywords :
Transportation Systems; Offline Demand Estimation; Traffic Assigment; Dynamic models; Optimization; Departure Time Choice; Calibration
Abstract :
[en] It has become very fashionable to talk about Mobility as a Service, multimodal transport networks, electrified and green vehicles, and sustainable transportation in general. Nowadays, the transportation field is exploring new angles to solve mobility issues, applying concepts such as using machine learning techniques to profile user behaviour. While for many years “traffic pressure” and “congestion phenomena” were the most established keywords, there is now a widespread body of research pointing out how new technologies alone will solve most of these issues. One of the main reasons for this change of direction is that earlier approaches have been proven to be more “fair” than “effective” in tackling mobility issues. The main limitation was probably to rely on simple assumptions, such as in-elastic mobility travel demand (car users will stick to their choice), when modelling travel behaviour. However, while these assumptions were questionable twenty years ago, they simply do not hold in today's society. While it is still true that high-income people usually own a car, the concept of urban mobility evolved. First, new generations are likely to buy a car ten-twenty years later than their parents. Second, in many cases, users can choose options that are more effective by combining different transport modes. Wealthy people might decide to live next to their working place or to the city centre, rather than to buy a car. Thus, it becomes clear that to understand the evolution of the mobility demand we need to question some of these assumptions. While data can help in understanding this societal transformation, we argue in this dissertation that they cannot be considered as the sole source of information for the decision maker. Although data have been there for many years, congestion levels are increasing, meaning that data alone cannot solve the problem. Although successful in many case studies, data-driven approaches have the limitation of being capable of modelling only what they observed in the past. If there is no record of a specific event, then the model will simply provide a biased information. In this manuscript we point out that both elements – data and model – are equally relevant to represent the evolution of a transport system, and specifically how important is to consider the heterogeneity of the mobility demand within the modelling framework in order to fully exploit the available data. In this manuscript, we focus on the so-called Dynamic Demand Estimation Problem (DODE), which is the problem of estimating the mobility demand patterns that are more likely to best fit all the available traffic data. While this dissertation still focuses on car-users, we stress that the activity based structure of the demand needs to be explicitly represented in order to capture the evolution of a transport system. While data show a picture of the reality, such as how many people are travelling on a certain road segment or even along a certain path, this information represents a coarse aggregation of different individuals sharing a common resource (i.e. the infrastructure). However, the traffic flow is composed of different users with different trip purposes, meaning they react differently to a certain event. If we shut down a road from one day to another, commuting and not commuting demand will react in a different way. The same concept holds when dealing with different weather conditions, which also lead to a different demand pattern with respect to the typical one. This dissertation presents different frameworks to solve the DODE, which explicitly focus on the estimation of the mobility demand when dealing with typical and atypical user behaviour. Although the approach still focuses on a single mode of transport (car-users), the proposed formulation includes the generalized travel cost within the optimization framework. This key element allows accounting for the departure time choice and, in principle, it can be extended to the mode choice in future work. The methodologies presented in this thesis have been tested with a “state of the practice” dynamic traffic assignment model. Results suggest that the models can be used for real-life networks, but also that more efficient algorithm should be considered for practical implementations in order to unleash the full potential of this new approach.
Disciplines :
Civil engineering
Author, co-author :
Cantelmo, Guido ;  University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Engineering Research Unit
Language :
English
Title :
Dynamic Origin-Destination Matrix Estimation with Interacting Demand Patterns
Defense date :
29 January 2018
Institution :
Unilu - University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Degree :
Docteur en Sciences de l'Ingénieur
Promotor :
Focus Area :
Sustainable Development
FnR Project :
FNR6947587 - Improving Demand Estimation With Activity Scheduling, 2013 (01/02/2014-31/01/2018) - Guido Cantelmo
Available on ORBilu :
since 11 September 2018

Statistics


Number of views
188 (21 by Unilu)
Number of downloads
354 (13 by Unilu)

Bibliography


Similar publications



Contact ORBilu