Estimation of dynamic origin-destination trip tables for a general network

In this paper, we propose a parametric optimization approach to estimate time-dependent path flows, or origin-destination (OD) trip tables, using available data on link traffic volumes for a general road network. Our model assumes knowledge of certain time-dependent link flow contribution factors that are a dynamic generalization of the path-link incidence matrix for the static case. A least squares model is accordingly formulated to determine the time-dependent trip tables. We develop a column generation approach that uses a sequence of dynamic shortest path subproblems in order to solve this problem. Computational results are presented on several variants of two sample test networks from the literature. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.