Carolina Osorio
Carolina Osorio is Staff Research Scientist at Google Research, Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at HEC Montreal, where Osorio holds the SCALE AI Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence for Urban Mobility and Logistics. Osorio's work develops simulation-based optimization techniques to inform the design and operations of urban mobility systems. Recognitions include a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an MIT CEE Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award, an IBM Faculty Award, a European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO) Doctoral Dissertation Award, and an invited speaker at the NAE (National Academy of Engineering) EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.
More information can be found at: carolinaosorio.net
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On the Use of Abundant Road Speed Data for Travel Demand Calibration of Urban Traffic Simulators
Suyash Vishnoi
Akhil Shetty
ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023 (2023) (to appear)
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This work develops a compute-efficient algorithm to tackle a fundamental problem in transportation: that of urban travel demand estimation. It focuses on the calibration of origin-destination travel demand input parameters for high-resolution traffic simulation models. It considers the use of abundant traffic road speed data.The travel demand calibration problem is formulated as a continuous, high-dimensional, simulation-based optimization (SO) problem with bound constraints. There is a lack of compute efficient algorithms to tackle this problem. We propose the use of an SO algorithm that relies on an efficient, analytical, differentiable, physics-based traffic model, known as a metamodel or surrogate model. We formulate a metamodel that enables the use of road speed data. Tests are performed on a Salt Lake City network. We study how the amount of data, as well as the congestion levels, impact both in-sample and out-of-sample performance. The proposed method outperforms the benchmark for both in-sample and out-of-sample performance by 84.4% and 72.2% in terms of speeds and counts, respectively. Most importantly, the proposed method yields the highest compute efficiency, identifying solutions with good performance within few simulation function evaluations (i.e., with small samples).
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Preview abstract
Being widely adopted by the transportation and planning practitioners, the fundamental diagram (FD) is the primary tool used to relate the key macroscopic traffic variables of speed, flow, and density. We empirically analyze the relation between vehicular space-mean speeds and flows given different signal settings and postulate a parsimonious parametric function form of the traditional FD where its function parameters are explicitly modeled as a function of the signal plan factors. We validate the proposed formulation using data from signalized urban road segments in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The proposed formulation builds our understanding of how changes to signal settings impact the FDs, and more generally the congestion patterns, of signalized urban segments.
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An Adversarial Variational Inference Approach for Travel Demand Calibration of Urban Traffic Simulators
Martin Mladenov
Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGSPATIAL Intl. Conf. on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL-22), Seattle, WA (2022) (to appear)
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This paper considers the calibration of travel demand inputs, defined as a set of origin-destination matrices (ODs), for stochastic microscopic urban traffic simulators. The goal of calibration is to find a (set of) travel demand input(s) that replicate sparse field count data statistics. While traditional approaches use only first-order moment information from the field data, it is well known that the OD calibration problem is underdetermined in realistic networks. We study the value of using higher-order statistics from spatially sparse field data to mitigate underdetermination, proposing a variational inference technique that identifies an OD distribution. We apply our approach to a high-dimensional setting in Salt Lake City, Utah. Our approach is flexible—it can be readily extended to account for arbitrary types of field data (e.g., road, path or trip data).
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An Efficient Simulation-Based Travel Demand Calibration Algorithm for Large-Scale Metropolitan Traffic Models
Yechen Li
Yi-fan Chen
Ziheng Lin
(2021) (to appear)
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Metropolitan scale vehicular traffic modeling is used by a variety of private and public sector urban mobil-ity stakeholders to inform the design and operations of road networks. High-resolution stochastic traffic simulators are increasingly used to describe detailed demand-supply interactions. The design of efficient calibration techniques remains a major challenge. This paper considers a class of high-dimensional calibration problems known as origin-destination (OD) calibration. We formulate the problem as a continuous simulation-based optimization problem. Our proposed algorithm builds upon recent metamodel methods that tackle the simulation-based problem by solving a sequence of approximate analytical optimization problems, which rely on the use of analytical network models. In this paper, we formulate a network model defined as a system of linear equations, the dimension of which scales linearly with the number of roads in the network and independently of the dimension of the route choice set. This makes the approach suitable for large-scale metropolitan networks. The approach has enhanced efficiency compared with past metamodel formulations that are based on systems of nonlinear, rather than linear, equations. It also has enhanced efficiency compared to traditional calibration methods that resort to simulation-based estimates of traffic assignment matrices, while the proposed approach uses analytical approximations of these matrices. We benchmark the approach considering a peak period Salt Lake City case study and calibrate based on field vehicular count data. The new formulation yields solutions with good performance, reduces the compute time needed, is suitable for large-scale road networks, and can be readily extended to account for other types of field data sources.
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Quantifying the sustainability impact of Google Maps: A case study of Salt Lake City
Theophile Cabannes
Yechen Li
Preston McAfee
2021 (2021) (to appear)
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Google Maps uses current and historical traffic trends to provide routes to drivers. In this paper, we use microscopic traffic simulation to quantify the improvements to both travel time and CO2 emissions from Google Maps real-time navigation. A case study in Salt Lake City shows that Google Maps users are, on average, saving 1.7% of CO2 emissions and 6.5% travel time. If we restrict to the users for which Google Maps finds a different route than their original route, the average savings are 3.4% of CO2 emissions and 12.5% of travel time. These results are based on traffic conditions observed during the Covid-19 pandemic. As congestion gradually builds back up to pre-pandemic levels, it is expected to lead to even greater savings in emissions.
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