Abstract
Previous OD matrix estimation methods from link traffic counts have focused on the formulation of mathematical model and its solution algorithm. Thereby those methods have assumed that true or real OD is similar to the target OD and paid little attention to the properties of the change of OD structure. Although it is general situation that each OD pair increases or decreases due to significant land use and to large time variation between target OD with real OD, those methods have set unrealistic assumptions that target OD increases or decreases uniformly and that the OD structure does not change. Therefore those methods have showed poor performance of OD estimation in general situation. To cope with the problem. this paper suggests a new concept of OD matrix structure and shows the shortcomings of previous method′s dependancy on target OD matrix. We divide "OD trips" into "OD scale" and "OD structure". Where OD scale is a quantitative magnitude of OD trips and "OD structure" is ordinal OD scale. This paper use the same solution algorithm developed by Baek et al. (2000) for analysing the OD structure. Results of numerical examples show that the performance of the method is better than that of previous methods, while the previous methods have better performance in estimation only when OD trips increase or decrease. In addition to, if OD structure does not change, the results show that the error of estimation is low relatively regardless of the large difference of trips between target OD and real OD. This paper also shows that the model performance on OD structure and on OD trips is low as the number of origins that OD structure is changed increase. From the results we suggest that the change of OD structure can be more important information than the difference between target OD and real OD in OD estimation steps.