DynaOD: Dynamic Origin-Destination Flow Generation with Discrete-to-Continuous Temporal Semantic Modeling
2026-06-08 • Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created a system called DynaOD to predict how people move between places over time, even without past travel data. They focus on understanding time-based patterns in city activities from two angles: big trend changes and gradual shifts. By combining these, the system produces realistic movement patterns that fit different city areas and times. Their method works well compared to others and can be easily used in different cities.
origin-destination flowmobility dynamicssemantic temporal signalsurban activity patternstime-varying region representationsstatic OD generatorstemporal evolutiondirectional trendscross-city transferabilitypredictive accuracy
Authors
Jie Zhao, Xianqi Dai, Jie Feng, Huandong Wang, Yong Li
Abstract
Dynamic origin-destination (OD) flow generation seeks to synthesize realistic mobility dynamics from temporal context alone, without relying on historical OD observations. A key challenge is to translate semantic temporal signals into temporally coherent OD patterns while preserving the inherent spatial heterogeneity of urban regions. We propose DynaOD, a semantic-driven framework that models temporal dynamics through two complementary perspectives: discrete directional trends that characterize qualitative shifts in urban activity patterns, and continuous temporal evolution that captures how such shifts unfold over time. By jointly encoding these temporal semantics, the framework constructs time-varying region representations that condition pretrained static OD generators in a lightweight and plug-and-play fashion. This modular design further supports scalable deployment and cross-city transferability. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show that our method consistently outperforms representative baselines in both predictive accuracy and distributional fidelity. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/csjiezhao/DynaOD.