A review of travel time estimation and forecasting for advanced traveler information systems

Providing on line travel time information to commuters has become an important issue for Advanced Traveler Information Systems and Route Guidance Systems in the past years, due to the increasing traffic volume and congestion in the road networks. Travel time is one of the most useful traffic variables because it is more intuitive than other traffic variables such as flow, occupancy or density, and is useful for travelers in decision making. The aim of this paper is to present a global view of the literature on the modeling of travel time, introducing crucial concepts and giving a thorough classification of the existing tech- niques. Most of the attention will focus on travel time estimation and travel time prediction, which are generally not presented together. The main goals of these models, the study areas and methodologies used to carry out these tasks will be further explored and categorized

Managed information gathering and fusion for transient transport problems

This paper deals with vehicular traffic management by communication technologies from Traffic Control Center point of view in road networks. The global goal is to manage the urban traffic by road traffic operations, controlling and interventional possibilities in order to minimize the traffic delays and stops and to improve traffic safety on the roads. This paper focuses on transient transport, when the controlling management is crucial. The aim was to detect the beginning time of the transient traffic on the roads, to gather the most appropriate data and to get reliable information for interventional suggestions. More reliable information can be created by information fusion, several fusion techniques are expounded in this paper. A half-automatic solution with Decision Support System has been developed to help with engineers in suggestions of interventions based on real time traffic data. The information fusion has benefits for Decision Support System: the complementary sensors may fill the gaps of one another, the system is able to detect the changing of the percentage of different vehicle types in traffic. An example of detection and interventional suggestion about transient traffic on transport networks of a little town is presented at the end of the paper. The novelty of this paper is the gathering of information - triggered by the state changing from stationer to transient - from ad hoc channels and combining them with information from developed regular channels. --information gathering,information fusion,Kalman filter,transient traffic,Decision Support System

Freeway Multisensor Data Fusion Approach Integrating Data from Cellphone Probes and Fixed Sensors

Freeway traffic state information from multiple sources provides sufficient support to the traffic surveillance but also brings challenges. This paper made an investigation into the fusion of a new data combination from cellular handoff probe system and microwave sensors. And a fusion method based on the neural network technique was proposed. To identify the factors influencing the accuracy of fusion results, we analyzed the sensitivity of those factors by changing the inputs of neural-network-based fusion model. The results showed that handoff link length and sample size were identified as the most influential parameters to the precision of fusion. Then, the effectiveness and capability of proposed fusion method under various traffic conditions were evaluated. And a comparative analysis between the proposed method and other fusion approaches was conducted. The results of simulation test and evaluation showed that the fusion method could complement the drawback of each collection method, improve the overall estimation accuracy, adapt to the variable traffic condition (free flow or incident state), suit the fusion of data from cellphone probes and fixed sensors, and outperform other fusion methods

Multi-Sensor Data Fusion for Travel Time Estimation

The importance of travel time estimation has increased due to the central role it plays in a number of emerging intelligent transport systems and services including Advanced Traveller Information Systems (ATIS), Urban Traffic Control (UTC), Dynamic Route Guidance (DRG), Active Traffic Management (ATM), and network performance monitoring. Along with the emerging of new sensor technologies, the much greater volumes of near real time data provided by these new sensor systems create opportunities for significant improvement in travel time estimation. Data fusion as a recent technique leads to a promising solution to this problem. This thesis presents the development and testing of new methods of multi-sensor data fusion for the accurate, reliable and robust estimation of travel time. This thesis reviews the state-of-art data fusion approaches and its application in transport domain, and discusses both of opportunities and challenging of applying data fusion into travel time estimation in a heterogeneous real time data environment. For a particular England highway scenario where ILDs and ANPR data are largely available, a simple but practical fusion method is proposed to estimate the travel time based on a novel relationship between space-mean-speed and time-mean-speed. In developing a general fusion framework which is able to fuse ILDs, GPS and ANPR data, the Kalman filter is identified as the most appropriate fundamental fusion technique upon which to construct the required framework. This is based both on the ability of the Kalman filter to flexibly accommodate well-established traffic flow models which describe the internal physical relation between the observed variables and objective estimates and on its ability to integrate and propagate in a consistent fashion the uncertainty associated with different data sources. Although the standard linear Kalman filter has been used for multi-sensor travel time estimation in the previous research, the novelty of this research is to develop a nonlinear Kalman filter (EKF and UKF) fusion framework which improves the estimation performance over those methods based on the linear Kalman filter. This proposed framework is validated by both of simulation and real-world scenarios, and is demonstrated the effectiveness of estimating travel time by fusing multi-sensor sources

Technology: a necessary but not sufficient condition for future personal mobility

Número especial: Sustainable Road Transportation Planning[Abstract:] Technological advances revolutionize industrial processes, science, communications, and our way of life. However, developed societies have reached a stage in which the fascination with technological innovations often results in their indiscriminate consumption. In this paper, road traffic is used as a line of argument to demonstrate that the random introduction of technology does not imply benefits to society. Particularly, it is analyzed why some of the potential benefits of technological progress are lost in fields such as traffic monitoring, data handling, and traffic management, or in sustainable mobility initiatives, such as the introduction of electric vehicles or the implementation vehicle sharing projects. The risks faced in the future advent of autonomous vehicles are also discussed, and ideas for improvement suggested. A critical reflection on other transportation modes that are expected to be realized in the near future is included as well. The performed analysis evidences that the potential improvement in personal mobility will not become a reality if it exclusively relies on the latest technological devices, in line with consumers’ fantasies or economic interests. This is a statement that could be generalized to many other fields. The implementation/consumption of a particular technology should not be an objective in itself, but a tool to bring benefits to society.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; TRA2016-79019-R/COO

Predicting Short-Term Traffic Congestion on Urban Motorway Networks

Traffic congestion is a widely occurring phenomenon caused by increased use of vehicles on roads resulting in slower speeds, longer delays, and increased vehicular queueing in traffic. Every year, over a thousand hours are spent in traffic congestion leading to great cost and time losses. In this thesis, we propose a multimodal data fusion framework for predicting traffic congestion on urban motorway networks. It comprises of three main approaches. The first approach predicts traffic congestion on urban motorway networks using data mining techniques. Two categories of models are considered namely neural networks, and random forest classifiers. The neural network models include the back propagation neural network and deep belief network. The second approach predicts traffic congestion using social media data. Twitter traffic delay tweets are analyzed using sentiment analysis and cluster classification for traffic flow prediction. Lastly, we propose a data fusion framework as the third approach. It comprises of two main techniques. The homogeneous data fusion technique fuses data of same types (quantitative or numeric) estimated using machine learning algorithms. The heterogeneous data fusion technique fuses the quantitative data obtained from the homogeneous data fusion model and the qualitative or categorical data (i.e. traffic tweet information) from twitter data source using Mamdani fuzzy rule inferencing systems. The proposed work has strong practical applicability and can be used by traffic planners and decision makers in traffic congestion monitoring, prediction and route generation under disruption