Observability of Origin-Destination matrices for Dynamic Traffic Assignment

The estimation of dynamic Origin-Destination (O-D) matrices from aggregated sensor counts is one of the most important and well-researched problems in Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) systems. In practice, more often than not, number of sensors are far less than the number of potential O-D pairs, and hence this problem is modeled in an optimization framework as function of historical estimates of O-D flows. However, in the absence of reliable historical O-D flows, it is critical that O-D estimation module is observable. Observability is defined as a property of the system by which it is possible to uniquely determine the (initial) state (O-D flows) of the system eventually by making regular indirect measurements of the state. In DTA systems, observability implies that given enough sensor data, it is possible to uniquely determine O-D flows without any prior information about them. This thesis develops a methodology to verify the observability property of the O-D estimation model given limited sensor coverage on the network. A case study involving a large-scale network from Los Angeles, California is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Gupta, Ashish, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Moshe E. Ben-Akiva.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33692

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33692