The traffic assignment problem is essential for traffic flow analysis, traditionally solved using mathematical programs under the Equilibrium principle. These methods become computationally prohibitive for large-scale networks due to non-linear growth in complexity with the number of OD pairs. This study introduces a novel data-driven approach using deep neural networks, specifically leveraging the Transformer architecture, to predict equilibrium path flows directly. By focusing on path-level traffic distribution, the proposed model captures intricate correlations between OD pairs, offering a more detailed and flexible analysis compared to traditional link-level approaches. The Transformer-based model drastically reduces computation time, while adapting to changes in demand and network structure without the need for recalculation. Numerical experiments are conducted on the Manhattan-like synthetic network, the Sioux Falls network, and the Eastern-Massachusetts network. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is orders of magnitude faster than conventional optimization. It efficiently estimates path-level traffic flows in multi-class networks, reducing computational costs and improving prediction accuracy by capturing detailed trip and flow information. Introduction The Traffic Assignment Problem (TAP) is a process of determining the propagation of flows over the transportation network. The goal is to calculate the network state, given the travel demand between various origin-destination (OD) pairs and the network's capacity constraints (Y osef Sheffi. Traditionally, this problem is solved through mathematical programs under the User Equilibrium (UE) principle, which assumes drivers possess perfect information and make fully rational choices (Wardrop, 1952). Despite potential deviations from reality, this approach consistently provides reasonable solutions to the traffic assignment problem (Bar-Gera, 2002; Jafari et al., 2017). However, the computation for determining optimal solutions in large traffic networks is prohibitively costly. This is because the problem's complexity grows non-linearly with the increase in the number of OD pairs and directly depends on feasible paths. When the size of the network (the number of links and nodes in a representative graph) increases, allowing us to explore more paths, the number of feasible paths also increases, and the OD demand matrix may grow accordingly, leading to a non-linear increase in computation time (Patriksson, 2015).

This work develops a compute-efficient algorithm to tackle a fundamental problem in transportation: that of urban travel demand estimation. It focuses on the calibration of origin-destination travel demand input parameters for high-resolution traffic simulation models. It considers the use of abundant traffic road speed data. The travel demand calibration problem is formulated as a continuous, high-dimensional, simulation-based optimization (SO) problem with bound constraints. There is a lack of compute efficient algorithms to tackle this problem. We propose the use of an SO algorithm that relies on an efficient, analytical, differentiable, physics-based traffic model, known as a metamodel or surrogate model. We formulate a metamodel that enables the use of road speed data. Tests are performed on a Salt Lake City network. We study how the amount of data, as well as the congestion levels, impact both in-sample and out-of-sample performance. The proposed method outperforms the benchmark for both in-sample and out-of-sample performance by 84.4% and 72.2% in terms of speeds and counts, respectively. Most importantly, the proposed method yields the highest compute efficiency, identifying solutions with good performance within few simulation function evaluations (i.e., with small samples).

Traffic assignment and traffic flow prediction provide critical insights for urban planning, traffic management, and the development of intelligent transportation systems. An efficient model for calculating traffic flows over the entire transportation network could provide a more detailed and realistic understanding of traffic dynamics. However, existing traffic prediction approaches, such as those utilizing graph neural networks, are typically limited to locations where sensors are deployed and cannot predict traffic flows beyond sensor locations. To alleviate this limitation, inspired by fundamental relationship that exists between link flows and the origin-destination (OD) travel demands, we proposed the Heterogeneous Spatio-Temporal Graph Sequence Network (HSTGSN). HSTGSN exploits dependency between origin and destination nodes, even when it is long-range, and learns implicit vehicle route choices under different origin-destination demands. This model is based on a heterogeneous graph which consists of road links, OD links (virtual links connecting origins and destinations) and a spatio-temporal graph encoder-decoder that captures the spatio-temporal relationship between OD demands and flow distribution. We will show how the graph encoder-decoder is able to recover the incomplete information in the OD demand, by using node embedding from the graph decoder to predict the temporal changes in flow distribution. Using extensive experimental studies on real-world networks with complete/incomplete OD demands, we demonstrate that our method can not only capture the implicit spatio-temporal relationship between link traffic flows and OD demands but also achieve accurate prediction performance and generalization capability.

Real-time what-if traffic prediction is crucial for decision making in intelligent traffic management and control. Although current deep learning methods demonstrate significant advantages in traffic prediction, they are powerless in what-if traffic prediction due to their nature of correlation-based. Here, we present a simple deep learning framework called TraffNet that learns the mechanisms of traffic generation for what-if prediction from vehicle trajectory data. First, we use a heterogeneous graph to represent the road network, allowing the model to incorporate causal features of traffic flows, such as Origin-Destination (OD) demands and routes. Next, we propose a method for learning segment representations, which involves modeling the process of assigning OD demands onto the road network. The learned segment representations effectively encapsulate the intricate causes of traffic generation, facilitating downstream what-if traffic prediction. Finally, we conduct experiments on synthetic datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of TraffNet. The code and datasets of TraffNet is available at https://github.com/mayunyi-1999/TraffNet_code.git.

The study focuses on estimating and predicting time-varying origin to destination (OD) trip tables for a dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) model. A bi-level optimisation problem is formulated and solved to estimate OD flows from pre-existent demand matrix and historical traffic flow counts. The estimated demand is then considered as an input for a time series OD demand prediction model to support the DTA model for short-term traffic condition forecasting. Results show a high capability of the proposed OD demand estimation method to reduce the DTA model error through an iterative solution algorithm. Moreover, the applicability of the OD demand prediction approach is investigated for an incident analysis application for a major corridor in Sydney, Australia.

Dynamic origin-destination (OD) demand is central to transportation system modeling and analysis. The dynamic OD demand estimation problem (DODE) has been studied for decades, most of which solve the DODE problem on a typical day or several typical hours. There is a lack of methods that estimate high-resolution dynamic OD demand for a sequence of many consecutive days over several years (referred to as 24/7 OD in this research). Having multi-year 24/7 OD demand would allow a better understanding of characteristics of dynamic OD demands and their evolution/trends over the past few years, a critical input for modeling transportation system evolution and reliability. This paper presents a data-driven framework that estimates day-to-day dynamic OD using high-granular traffic counts and speed data collected over many years. The proposed framework statistically clusters daily traffic data into typical traffic patterns using t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and k-means methods. A GPU-based stochastic projected gradient descent method is proposed to efficiently solve the multi-year 24/7 DODE problem. It is demonstrated that the new method efficiently estimates the 5-minute dynamic OD demand for every single day from 2014 to 2016 on I-5 and SR-99 in the Sacramento region. The resultant multi-year 24/7 dynamic OD demand reveals the daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal and yearly change in travel demand in a region, implying intriguing demand characteristics over the years.