Investigating the performance of SPSA in simulation-optimization approaches to transportation problems

While optimization models play a key role in transportation analysis, the objective function to be optimized, however, cannot be defined analytically. It is therefore necessary to resort to non-differentiable optimization methods that usually pivot on evaluating the objective function. Special cases...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Ros-Roca, Xavier, Montero Mercadé, Lídia|||0000-0001-5722-138X, Schneck, Arne, Barceló Bugeda, Jaime|||0000-0001-6195-6434
Format: article
Publication Date:2018
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/126688
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/126688
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2018.11.017
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Matrices
System theory
dynamic OD matrix estimation
SPSA
Dynamic User Equilibrium
sensitivity analysis
Matrius (Àlgebra)
Investigació operativa
Classificació AMS::15 Linear and multilinear algebra
matrix theory
Classificació AMS::93 Systems Theory
Control::93C Control systems, guided systems
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística::Àlgebra
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística::Investigació operativa::Optimització
Description
Summary:While optimization models play a key role in transportation analysis, the objective function to be optimized, however, cannot be defined analytically. It is therefore necessary to resort to non-differentiable optimization methods that usually pivot on evaluating the objective function. Special cases of particular interest are those in Dynamic OD Estimation, which cannot evaluate the objective function analytically and thus the formulation falls in the computational framework of Simulation-Optimization. SPSA is not limited to the inputs from conventional traffic counts and can be easily extended to account for the measurements of traffic variables supplied by emerging sensors exploiting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Numerical experiments have been conducted, and the results have been analyzed from two different perspectives: performance and solution quality. This allows understanding the behavior of the SPSA algorithm and new variants, which altogether contribute to the aim of adding ICT measures in the future. Their sensitivity to the initial values, the effect of bounding the variables and scaling techniques are analyzed. This paper will report on the results of the numerical experiments, their analyses, conclusions and further research.