Distributionally robust origin–destination demand estimation

Gaining a good understanding of the travel demands of a city or region is extremely important for many transportation applications. For stochastic origin–destination (OD) estimation problems, an accurate distribution assumption or observation of OD estimates or data is usually desired but not always available. In this paper, we establish a novel two-stage OD estimation framework based on distributionally robust optimization (DRO) and quasi-sparsity property of large-scale OD demand matrices. The proposed two-stage Distributionally Robust Quasi-Sparsity OD estimation (DR-QSOD) model does not require an accurate or complete distribution assumption of estimates/data. Numerical results demonstrate that DR-QSOD model outperforms stochastic QSOD model in estimating OD demands when the distribution assumption of data is biased. This paper also discusses two different approaches to solve the DR-QSOD model as well as compares their computational efficiency. In addition, DR-QSOD model is shown to keep relatively high quasi-sparsity consistency, which also brings lots of meaningful practical insights.