Personalized origin–destination travel time estimation with active adversarial inverse reinforcement learning and Transformer

Travel time estimation is important for instant delivery, vehicle routing, and ride-hailing. Most studies estimate the travel time of specified routes, and only a few studies pay attention to origin–destination travel time estimation (OD-TTE) without a specified route. Moreover, most of these studies on OD-TTE ignore the personalized route preference and the cost of data annotation. To fill this research gap, we analyze the individual route preference and propose a personalized origin–destination travel time estimation method based on active adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (AA-IRL) and Transformer. To analyze the personalized route preference, we integrate adversarial inverse reinforcement learning with active learning, which effectively reduces the cost of sample annotation. After inferring the possible routes, we propose AdaBoost multi-fusion graph convolutional Transformer network (AMGC-Transformer) for travel time estimation. Numerical experiments conducted on ride-hailing and online food delivery trajectories in China validate the advantage of our method. Compared to relevant studies, our approach can improve F1-score of route inference by 2.50–3.35% and reduce the mean absolute error of OD-TTE by 7.44–11.66%.