MoveOD: Synthesizing Origin-Destination Commute Distribution from U.S. Census Data

TL;DR

MOVEOD is an open-source pipeline that synthesizes detailed origin-destination commute data for US counties using public datasets, enabling transportation modeling and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, automated method to generate high-resolution OD commute data from multiple open sources, filling a critical data gap in many US regions.

Findings

Generated 150,000 synthetic trips for Hamilton County, Tennessee.

Demonstrated compatibility with classical and learning-based vehicle-routing algorithms.

Enabled easy application across US counties with minimal input.

Abstract

High-resolution origin-destination (OD) tables are essential for a wide spectrum of transportation applications, from modeling traffic and signal timing optimization to congestion pricing and vehicle routing. However, outside a handful of data rich cities, such data is rarely available. We introduce MOVEOD, an open-source pipeline that synthesizes public data into commuter OD flows with fine-grained spatial and temporal departure times for any county in the United States. MOVEOD combines five open data sources: American Community Survey (ACS) departure time and travel time distributions, Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LODES) residence-to-workplace flows, county geometries, road network information from OpenStreetMap (OSM), and building footprints from OSM and Microsoft, into a single OD dataset. We use a constrained sampling and integer-programming method to reconcile the OD dataset with data from ACS and LODES. Our approach involves: (1) matching commuter totals per origin zone, (2) aligning workplace destinations with employment distributions, and (3) calibrating travel durations to ACS-reported commute times. This ensures the OD data accurately reflects commuting patterns. We demonstrate the framework on Hamilton County, Tennessee, where we generate roughly 150,000 synthetic trips in minutes, which we feed into a benchmark suite of classical and learning-based vehicle-routing algorithms. The MOVEOD pipeline is an end-to-end automated system, enabling users to easily apply it across the United States by giving only a county and a year; and it can be adapted to other countries with comparable census datasets. The source code and a lightweight browser interface are publicly available.