A bilevel model for public transport demand estimation

NEILA BHOURI; JEAN-PATRICK LEBACQUE; PABLO A. LOTITO; VICTORIA M. ORLANDO

Pafos

Conferencia; 23rd EURO Working Group on Transportation Meeting, EWGT 2020; 2020

European Working Group on Transportation

Abstract:For the case of public transport, we consider the problem of demand estimation. Given an origin-destination matrix representing the public transport demand, the distribution of flow among different lines can be obtained assuming that it corresponds to a certain equilibrium characterized by an optimization problem. However the knowledge of origin-destination matrix is expensive and sometimes unaffordable in practice. Traditionally, it is estimated using statistical or econometrical considerations. In this work, we explore the estimation through the numerical solution of a bilevel optimization problem. One disadvantage of this formulation is the difficulty of obtaining descent directions, hence, for the resolution of the optimization problem we use a derivative-free method. This method was applied for small networks getting good results.