Real-Time Calibration of Disaggregated Traffic Demand

Abstract

Real-time traffic demand estimation is essential for intelligent transportation systems and traffic forecasting in urban areas. Hence, this paper presents a simulation-based optimization framework for city-scale real-time estimation and calibration of dynamic demand models by focusing on disaggregated microsimulation in congested networks. The calibration approach is based on sequential optimization demand estimation for short time frames and uses a stream of traffic count data from IoT sensors on selected roads. The proposed method builds upon the standard bi-level optimization formulation. The upper-level optimization problem is presented as a bounded variable quadratic programming in each time frame, making it computationally tractable. The DTA (dynamic traffic assignment) problem at the lower level is approached based on the stochastic route choice model. For every time frame, the probabilistic parameters of the route choice model are obtained through several rounds of feedback loop between the OD optimization problem (at the upper level) and parallel samplings and simulations for DTA (at the lower level). At the end of each time frame, the microsimulation state of the network is transferred to the next time frame to ensure the temporal dependency and continuity of the estimations during the time. In addition, the algorithm's convergence is accelerated by applying the fixed-point method to road-segment travel times. The proposed sequential calibration model presents a drastic computational advantage over available methods by splitting the computations into short time frames and under the assumption that the demand in each time frame only depends on current and previous time frames. The model does not depend on reliable prior demand information. Moreover, with receiving the field measurements as a stream and the efficient time complexity of the algorithm in each time frame, the method successfully presents a solution for high-dimensional real-time and online applications. We validated the method with synthetic data and for a real-world case study in Tartu city, Estonia. The results show high accuracy under a tight computational budget.