Estimating On-road Transportation Carbon Emissions from Open Data of Road Network and Origin-destination Flow Data

Abstract: Accounting for over 20% of the total carbon emissions, the precise estimation of on-road transportation carbon emissions is crucial for carbon emission monitoring and efficient mitigation policy formulation. However, existing estimation methods typically depend on hard-to-collect individual statistics of vehicle miles traveled to calculate emissions, thereby suffering from high data collection difficulty. To relieve this issue by utilizing the strong pattern recognition of artificial intelligence, we incorporate two sources of open data representative of the transportation demand and capacity factors, the origin-destination (OD) flow data and the road network data, to build a hierarchical heterogeneous graph learning method for on-road carbon emission estimation (HENCE). Specifically, a hierarchical graph consisting of the road network level, community level, and region level is constructed to model the multi-scale road network-based connectivity and travel connection between spatial areas. Heterogeneous graphs consisting of OD links and spatial links are further built at both the community level and region level to capture the intrinsic interactions between travel demand and road network accessibility. Extensive experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate HENCE's effectiveness and superiority with R-squared exceeding 0.75 and outperforming baselines by 9.60% on average, validating its success in pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to empower carbon emission management and sustainability development. The implementation codes are available at this link: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/HENCE.