Origindestinationanalyses

Origin-destination analyses, commonly abbreviated as OD analyses, are methods used to quantify and study flows of people, goods, or information between origins and destinations within a geographic area. An origin-destination (OD) matrix records the number of trips from each origin location to each destination location and serves as a foundational input for transport planning, urban analysis, and related fields. In some contexts, the term origindestinationanalyses is used as a single compound designation for this approach.

OD analyses rely on data that track movements. Traditional sources include travel surveys and manual or automatic traffic counts. Modern approaches increasingly use passive data such as mobile phone records, GPS traces, and smart-card transit data. Estimation techniques include model-based methods like gravity models and radiation models, as well as entropy maximization or data-imputation approaches to construct complete OD matrices from partial information.

Applications span transportation planning and policy, including congestion assessment, capacity analysis, network design, and public transit optimization. They also support land-use planning, economic development analyses, emergency response planning, and epidemiological modeling by highlighting potential routes and exchange volumes among zones.

Limitations and challenges include concerns about privacy and data protection, bias and representativeness in survey or passive data, varying temporal and spatial resolutions, and the need to align OD matrices with real-world activity through validation. Model assumptions—such as the gravity or radiation framework—also influence results and should be stated clearly.