Multimodal traffic assignment from privacy-protected OD data

The (static) traffic assignment (TA) problem, which computes network equilibrium flows from origin–destination (OD) demand under flow conservation, is central to transportation modeling. As multimodal transportation systems (MTSs) grow, sharing detailed OD data – such as trip counts, timestamps, and routes – raises serious privacy concerns. Differential privacy (DP) has emerged as the leading standard for releasing such data, offering adjustable protection beyond traditional anonymization. However, current methods mostly apply extrinsic DP by adding noise to aggregate OD matrices before release, without fully addressing its effects on traffic modeling. This reveals TA’s unpreparedness for privacy-protected data and calls for redesigned methods that operate reliably under such constraints. To fill this gap, we propose the privacy-preserving traffic assignment (PPTA) framework, which embeds DP intrinsically within the TA process. Instead of externally perturbing aggregate demand, PPTA injects structured noise at the individual trip level. This preserves privacy while ensuring equilibrium feasibility through chance-constrained optimization, unifying privacy protection and traffic assignment. The framework supports various discrete choice models and noise types, using a moment-based approximation to boost computational efficiency. Our results show PPTA attains a privacy-utility balance beyond extrinsic methods, enabling robust, privacy-aware multimodal routing, network design, and pricing.