DYNAMIC ORIGIN-DESTINATION MATRIX ESTIMATION ON MOTORWAY NETWORKS

This thesis describes research into the problem of tracking time varying Entry-Exit (EE) travel demand from time series of observations, applied to small networks such as motorway corridors. To eliminate the underspecification that was shown to be inherent to this problem a model referred to as the motorway model was specified. The objective of the thesis is not only to improve the theoretical underpinning, but also to expand the practical applicability of dynamic EE-estimation methods. The commonly used restrictions that the entry flows are exactly known, traffic counts do not involve internal links, and travel times are small relative to the length of the discretisation period are relaxed by explicitely taking errors in entry volume observations into account, allowing for the use of internal link counts, and relaxing the assumption of small travel times into the assumption of small travel time dispersion. Taking the motorway model as a point of departure, a second step in the research involved deriving system properties following from the model, deriving estimators for its parameters, and investigating how additional sources of information may be used to improve the estimates. (A)