Real-Time Calibration of Disaggregated Traffic Demand

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, simulation-based optimization framework for city-scale disaggregated traffic demand calibration, leveraging IoT sensor data and a bi-level quadratic programming approach for efficient and accurate demand estimation.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel sequential calibration method that improves computational efficiency and accuracy for real-time traffic demand estimation without relying on prior demand data.

Findings

High accuracy achieved in synthetic data validation

Effective real-world application demonstrated in Tartu city

Significant computational speedup over existing methods

Abstract

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. 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.