Daily pattern recognition of dynamic origin-destination matrices using clustering and kernel principal component analysis

Abstract: Origin-Destination (OD) matrix plays an important role in traffic management and urban planning. However, the OD estimation demands large data collection which has been done in past mostly by surveys with numerous limitations. With the development of communication technology and artificial intelligence technology, the transportation industry experiences new opportunities and challenges. Sensors bring big data characterized by 4V (Volume, Variety, Velocity, Value) to the transportation domain. This allows traffic practitioners to receive data covering large-scale areas and long time periods, even several years of data. At the same time, the introduction of artificial intelligence technology provides new opportunities and challenges in processing massive data. Advances from computer science have also brought revolutionary advancements in the field of transportation. All these new advances and technologies enable large data collection that can be used for extracting and estimating dynamic OD matrices for small time intervals and long time periods.Using Stockholm as the focus of the case study, this thesis estimates dynamic OD matrices covering data collected from the tolls located around Stockholm municipality. These dynamic OD matrices are used to analyze the day-to-day characteristics of the traffic flow that goes through Stockholm. In other words, the typical day-types of traffic through the city center are identified and studied in this work. This study analyzes the data collected by 58 sensors around Stockholm containing nearly 100 million vehicle observations (12GB).Furthermore, we consider and study the effects of dimensionality reduction on the revealing of most common day-types by clustering. The considered dimensionality reduction techniques are Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its variant Kernel PCA (KPCA). The results reveal that dimensionality reduction significantly drops computational costs while resulting in reasonable day-types. Day-type clusters reveal expected as unexpected patterns and thus could have potential in traffic management, urban planning, and designing the strategy for congestion tax.