Multiple-vehicle origin-destination matrix estimation from traffic counts using genetic algorithm

Existing methods for estimating origin-destination (O-D) matrix from link traffic counts cannot consider multiple-vehicle information, which is easily obtained from a field survey. Those methods use a single-vehicle information and it may decrease the performance of an O-D matrix estimator. Up until now, there is little research regarding multiple-vehicle O-D matrix estimation from multiple-vehicle link counts. This paper suggests a multiple-vehicle O-D matrix estimation from traffic counts using a genetic algorithm (GAMUC). From the numerical tests, we found that the performance of GAMUC was better than those of the previous methods for the error of target O-D matrix and for the number of link counts. In this paper, we also found that the method provided good results on the error of target O-D matrix and on the varied O-D matrix structure, which occurred when the target O-D matrix was different from the true one.