Dynamic origin–destination flow estimation for urban road network solely using probe vehicle trajectory data

Dynamic origin–destination (OD) flow is a fundamental input for dynamic network models and simulators. Numerous studies have conducted dynamic OD estimations based on fixed detectors, where a high device coverage rate and data quality are often required to accomplish the desired results. Several existing methods have used probe vehicle trajectories as an additional data source, and generalized least squares (GLS) is commonly recognized as an effective framework. However, the prior matrices used in these models either came from historical data or data obtained by uniform scaling that neglected the variation in penetration rates and suffer from sparsity issues. Moreover, the microscopic information contained in the high-resolution probe vehicle trajectories has not been fully utilized. The possibility of estimating OD flows using only vehicle trajectories without external information is rarely discussed in current literature. Therefore, this paper introduces a dynamic OD flow estimation model solely using probe vehicle trajectories. In the proposed model, two methods based on probe OD pair distribution are proposed to infer prior OD flows. Then the GLS framework is extended by including link travel times as another objective term, and the solution algorithm is adapted to deal with uncertain priors. To validate the proposed model, extensive experiments were conducted on a simulation network. The results show that the proposed model could reliably estimate dynamic OD flows and showed superiority to two existing models. In sensitivity analysis concerning the penetration rate and degree of saturation, the proposed model presented satisfactory performance and could adapt to various conditions.