Applying Automatic Fare Collection System to Estimate a Transit Passenger Trip Origin-Destination Matrix

Abstract

Automatic fare collection system (AFCS) has been widely used for public transport all over the world. However, the Origin-Destination (OD) matrix of each passenger, the most important information, cannot be collected from AFCS since only boarding information is recorded at each bus stop and alighting one is lost. This study develops passenger trajectories estimation to calculate OD matrix by using pre-processed smart card data from AFCS in one city. The results of a rigorous validation with on/off data from a real-world bus route reveal that the proposed model is quite effective and reliable on estimating the OD matrix for identification of the underlying demand pattern of a transit route. The results have shown that the OD estimation from the proposed algorithm match more than 75% with the actual OD pairs. During the peak hours, the matching rate can go up to 85%.