An Efficient Algorithm for Real-Time Estimation and Prediction of Dynamic OD Tables

The problem of estimating and predicting Origin-Destination (OD) tables is known to be important and difficult. In the specific context of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the dynamic nature of the problem and the real-time requirements make it even more intricate. We consider here a least-square modeling approach for solving the OD estimation and prediction problem, which seems to offer convenient and flexible algorithms. The dynamic nature of the problem is represented by an auto-regressive process, capturing the serial correlations of the state variables. Our formulation is inspired from Cascetta, Inaudi and Marquis (1993) and Ashok and Ben-Akiva (1993). We compare the Kalman filter algorithm to LSQR, an iterative algorithm proposed by Paige and Saunders (1982) for the solution of large-scale least-squares problems. LSQR explicitly exploits matrix sparsity, allowing to consider larger problems, likely to occur in real applications.