Estimation of Hourly Origin Destination Trip Matrices for a Model of Norrköping

Abstract: During the last century, the number of car users has increased as an effect of the increasing population growth. To manage the environmental and infrastructural challenges that comes with a more congested traffic network, traffic planning has become of higher importance to analyze the current traffic state and to predict future capacity challenges and effects of investments. These analysis and evaluations are commonly performed in different traffic analysis tools, where updated and realistic traffic demand needs to be provided to ensure reasonable results. In this thesis, a macroscopic model of Norrköping municipality constructed in the traffic demand modelling software Visum and a daily Origin-Destination(OD)-matrix is considered. The goal of this thesis is to produce a method that modify the current daily demand matrix into hourly demand matrices, called hourly target matrices, that represents a typical weekday. The goal is also to implement and evaluate the OD-estimation algorithm Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) to obtain updated and valid demand matrices for the network model of Norrköping. The method of dividing the daily demand matrix into hourly target matrices is based on the paper by Spiess %26 Suter (1990). The method makes use of the available daily trip purpose matrices combined with hourly link flow observations from 96 links in a multiple linear regression model to obtain 24 hourly demand matrices. The resulting matrices are compared with the link flow observations and has different levels of R^2-fit, the maximum fit is 85.79 % and the minimum fit is 55.89 %. The average R^2-value is 72 %. The OD-estimation based on SPSA is performed on the AM and PM peak hours. The algorithm is implemented in Python scripts that are called from Visum where the traffic assignments is calculated. The result is an increase in R^2-value since the link flow difference between estimated and observed link flow is decreased. In total, the estimated link flows are improved by 7.4 % in the AM peak hour and 15.6 % in the PM peak hour. The total absolute change in OD-demand is 3 871 trips for AM peak hour and 6 452 trips for the PM peak hour. The estimated OD-matrices are evaluated by qualitatively visualizing the difference in heat maps and in the quantitative measure structural similarity index. The result is no major structural change from the hourly target matrices which verifies that the information used when the target matrices is produced still is considered. The total demand increased in both hours, with 505 respectively 2 431 trips and flows in some OD-pairs has a very high percental change. This was restricted by adding a penalty term to the SPSA-algorithm on the PM peak hour. The result of penalized SPSA is a much less increase of total demand as well as less percental change of the OD-flows. Though, this to a cost of not decreasing the link flow difference in the same magnitude.