Trip Table Realization: Underlying Stochasticity and Impacts on Assigned Link Flows

Uncertainty analyses in transportation systems and traffic assignment practices seem to have overlooked the stochasticity feature of a trip table, which in this paper refers to the day-to-day random variation in travel demand distribution. The authors consider the stochasticity is an inherent nature of an original trip table that is obtained from travel demand models or trip surveys, and try to gauge the imposed variations of link flows and costs. By using a Poisson trip table realization procedure, two different original trip tables from Chicago and Barceloa were “rehabilitated” to thirty stochastic realized trip tables. A series of comparisons were made between the original and realized trip tables, assigned link flows and costs, VMTs and VHTs. Absolute and relative variations were also measured among the thirty realized trip tables. The results suggested that although large discrepancy exists for the cell-level OD trips the overall variability of the assigned link flows and costs is fairly small. At the same time, large flow variations do exist on some links. The findings justified the common practice of only using an original trip table to do trip assignment, given the purpose of the analysis is to obtain overall network performance measurements, such as VMT, VHT. On the other hand, it should be cautioned in drawing conclusions on a subnetwork level analysis (individual link level) and scenario analysis where large link flow variations may be found. In such cases, the effect of trip table stochasticity should not be ignored and using multiple realized trip tables is recommended.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Pu, Wenjing
  • Boyce, David E
  • Lin, Jie
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 86th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2007-1-21 to 2007-1-25
• Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 86th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers CD-ROM

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Origin and destination; Performance measurement; Stochastic processes; Traffic assignment; Traffic flow; Travel demand; Travel surveys; Trip tables; Vehicle miles of travel
• Uncontrolled Terms: Link flow; Vehicle hours traveled
• Geographic Terms: Chicago (Illinois)
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01047533
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 07-1965
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Feb 8 2007 6:40PM