Developing an iterative procedure to estimate origin-destination matrix based on two-point license plate tracking system

Origin-Destination Matrix, one of the most important elements in transportation planning, is usually estimated by various techniques such as mathematical modeling, statistical methods, and heuristic approaches. Since using electronic devices is rapidly increased to help decision makers to improve models’ capabilities, an iterative procedure is proposed in this paper to estimate the O-D Matrix according to vehicles’ license plates detection. The main concept is to track vehicles on the first and the last links equipped by plate camera over the shortest path from origins to destinations. A two-step procedure and mathematical models are developed to adjust assigned the passing traffic to the network links by minimizing deviations between the observed and estimated truck traffic volumes. The proposed procedure is explained by an illustrative example followed by validation using experimental road network that covers seven eastern provinces of Iran including 310 nodes, 400 two-way edges, and around 3600 origin and destination pairs. Results revealed that the proposed procedure is capable to estimate O-D matrix when the network links are optimally located and equipped by road camera detection systems. In addition, such as the other heuristic approaches, the proposed procedure is sensitive to the number of iterations on the estimation accuracy.