Innovations in transportation, such as mobility-on-demand services and autonomous driving, call for high-resolution routing that relies on an accurate representation of travel time throughout the underlying road network. Specifically, the travel time of a road-network edge is modeled as a time-varying distribution that captures the variability of traffic over time and the fact that different drivers may traverse the same edge at the same time at different speeds. Such stochastic weights may be extracted from data sources such as GPS and loop detector data. However, even very large data sources are incapable of covering all edges of a road network at all times. Yet, high-resolution routing needs stochastic weights for all edges. We solve the problem of filling in the missing weights. To achieve that, we provide techniques capable of estimating stochastic edge weights for all edges from traffic data that covers only a fraction of all edges. We propose a generic learning framework called Graph Convolutional Weight Completion (GCWC) that exploits the topology of a road network graph and the correlations of weights among adjacent edges to estimate stochastic weights for all edges. Next, we incorporate contextual information into GCWC to further improve accuracy. Empirical studies using loop detector data from a highway toll gate network and GPS data from a large city offer insight into the design properties of GCWC and its effectiveness.
With the growing volumes of vehicle trajectory data, it becomes increasingly possible to capture time-varying and uncertain travel costs in a road network, including travel time and fuel consumption. The current paradigm represents a road network as a weighted graph; it blasts trajectories into small fragments that fit the under-lying edges to assign weights to edges; and it then applies a routing algorithm to the resulting graph. We propose a new paradigm, the hybrid graph , that targets more accurate and more efficient path cost distribution estimation. The new paradigm avoids blasting trajectories into small fragments and instead assigns weights to paths rather than simply to the edges. We show how to compute path weights using trajectory data while taking into account the travel cost dependencies among the edges in the paths. Given a departure time and a query path, we show how to select an optimal set of weights with associated paths that cover the query path and such that the weights enable the most accurate joint cost distribution estimation for the query path. The cost distribution of the query path is then computed accurately using the joint distribution. Finally, we show how the resulting method for computing cost distributions of paths can be integrated into existing routing algorithms. Empirical studies with substantial trajectory data from two different cities offer insight into the design properties of the proposed method and confirm that the method is effective in real-world settings.