A Scaling Method for Floating Car Data from Navigation Devices to Represent Initial Trip Tables and Total Traffic Flows

Probe data from consumer global positioning system (GPS) navigation devices, a type of floating car data (FCD), can provide high-quality information across the entire transportation network. But in order to get high quality information a stable penetration rate should be available and the device users should be an accurate representation of all travelers. An earlier exploration of a specific source of FCD discovered that FCD collected from navigation providers does not fulfill these requirements. Still the bias between sample and population was found to be consistent, providing an opportunity to correct for these trends. This paper presents a scaling method to adjust a trip database acquired through probe data collected from consumer GPS navigation devices to fit known traffic counts. In a first step, a regression model is built to estimate traffic counts on every link of the transportation network using reference traffic counts measured by road side sensors. In a second step, a method based on iterative proportional fitting (IPF) is suggested to find individual trip weighing factors per trip to scale the trip database in such a way that the entire trip database represents the estimated traffic counts in the best way possible. The method was tested in a case study, with an average resulting error of 25% between scaled trip database and traffic counts. The scaling method discussed in this paper is a proof of concept. It has been proven that it reduces the error between the FCD trip database and reference traffic counts, but can be further optimized.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Bischoff, Huug
  • Arentze, Theo
  • Borgers, Aloys
  • Cohn, Nick
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2012-1-22 to 2012-1-26
• Date: 2012

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 11p
• Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Advanced driver information systems; Floating car data; Global Positioning System; Traffic flow; Trip tables
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01367667
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 12-0908
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Apr 11 2012 11:10AM