In earlier work (Zhang et al., 2016) we used actual traffic data from the
Eastern Massachusetts transportation network in the form of spatial average
speeds and road segment flow capacities in order to estimate Origin-Destination
(OD) flow demand matrices for the network. Based on a Traffic Assignment
Problem (TAP) formulation (termed "forward problem"), in this paper we use a
scheme similar to our earlier work to estimate initial OD demand matrices and
then propose a new inverse problem formulation in order to estimate user cost
functions. This new formulation allows us to efficiently overcome numerical
difficulties that limited our prior work to relatively small subnetworks and,
assuming the travel latency cost functions are available, to adjust the values
of the OD demands accordingly so that the flow observations are as close as
possible to the solutions of the forward problem. We also derive sensitivity
analysis results for the total user latency cost with respect to important
parameters such as road capacities and minimum travel times. Finally, using the
same actual traffic data from the Eastern Massachusetts transportation network,
we quantify the Price of Anarchy (POA) for a much larger network than that in
Zhang et al. (2016).Comment: Preprint submitted to The 20th World Congress of the International
Federation of Automatic Control, July 9-14, 2017, Toulouse, Franc