An operational alternative to origin/destination matrices

Abstract

A round-trip based alternative to origin/destination matrices is presented. The formal approach treats the round-trips of a population as a distributed quantity and adopts statistical techniques to the evaluation of this distribution. An operational Bayesian calibration approach is presented as a round-trip-based counterpart to origin/destination matrix estimation. Several concrete applications of the framework are presented. We believe that the vastly increased representative power of a round-trip-based model when compared to origin/destination matrices, in combination with its compatibility with modern agent-based simulation packages, outweighs its somewhat more involved technical development.