A new approach to calibrating time-dependent origin-destination departure profile for traffic simulation models

This paper presents a new method that is capable of calibrating time-dependent origin-destination matrices in order to generate a temporal profile such that the congestion pattern at the bottleneck of interest is properly depicted. The method is based on understanding the demand supply relationship at the bottleneck and the utilization of shockwave and travel time propagation between origin and bottleneck. The numerical results presented in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method under situations in which initial demand matrices deviate from the true matrices with varying degrees of deviations.