Evaluation of speed estimation by floating car data within the research project Dmotion

Abstract

The research project Dmotion aims at a comprehensive traffic management strategy for regional and local authorities, as well as for private service providers. The use of floating car data (FCD) provides an efficient way to estimate speeds and traffic state. Availability and quality of FCD from taxi fleets and public transport were compared. FCD speeds from taxis were evaluated against independent route speed measurements. Furthermore a model was developed to integrate FCD from public transport fleets into traffic state detection. Results of route speeds based on FCD show that taxi data can be used for estimating average route speeds of the whole driving population. Temporal trends of average speeds during a day can be captured by taxi data. Spatial resolution of trip information (i.e. frequency of messages), however, has to be improved in order to avoid biased results. As FCD from taxi fleets only cover a limited percentage of links per time interval, substituting information from historical time series for missing values is of basic importance. Completing speed information greatly improves its value for data fusion. The use of public transport vehicles as floating cars proves to be an interesting and cheap additional data source for urban traffic state estimation. For the covering abstract see ITRD E140665.