Data Collection of Freeway Travel Time Ground Truth with Bluetooth Sensors

Abstract

Accurate travel time information is essential to the effective management of traffic conditions. Traditionally, floating car data have been used as the primary source of ground truth for measuring the quality of real-time travel time provided by traffic surveillance systems. This paper introduces Bluetooth sensors as a new and effective means of data collection of freeway ground truth travel time. The concept of vehicle identification using Bluetooth signatures for travel time estimation along a section of freeway is explained. Issues related to error analysis, filtering of raw matched data, and accuracy of the resulting ground truth compared with floating car are discussed. Data from loop detectors on several freeway segments are used to approximate and report the average sampling rate of Bluetooth sensors. Results show that the new technology is a promising method for collecting high-quality travel time data that can be used as ground truth for evaluating other sources of travel time and other intelligent transportation system applications.

Traffic Data: Bluetooth Sensors vs. Crowdsourcing—A Comparative Study to Calculate Travel Time Reliability in Calgary, Alberta, Canada

“…The total costs (in thousand dollars per mile) for a 5-year monitoring period revealed that the Bluetooth technology is the least costly method compared to the others. [9] freeway data quality for the I-95 Corridor Coalition VPP [10,11]. On this corridor, the Bluetooth technology has set the standard for quality control for outsourced traffic data [10].…”

“…A study by the University of Maryland demonstrates that well-placed sensors should provide a 4% detection rate for roadways of 36,000 ADT (average daily traffic) or more [11]. Young [24] showed even a 2% match rate on a roadway of 100,000 ADT would provide more than enough hits to accurately generate mean travel times in 5 min intervals.…”

Wireless Data Collection System for Real-Time Arterial Travel Time Estimates: Final Report

“…The DCUs that have been reported in the literature vary from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) laptop computers to custom-built units which may include additional capabilities, such as global positioning system (GPS) receivers and/or cellular communications modules for remote data transfer (Haghani et al, 2010;Haseman et al, 2010;Quayle et al, 2010).…”

Sensing Bluetooth Mobility Data: Potentials and Applications

“…Further investigation focusing on the use of cellular network data for inferring real-time mobility information has been conducted through surveys and data classication identifying the advantages and limitations of this method. Particularly, a discussion on the ways to increase the accuracy of known cellular positioning techniques through a traffic congestion estimation service application and studying the trajectory of several thousand of anonymous mobile phone users are found in [20,21] A new promising technology has been proposed in the traffic and urban planning community based on the interception of Bluetooth Media Access Control (MAC) addresses for the monitoring of traffic conditions that will open new measurement possibilities [22,23,18,2,5,16]. The uniqueness of the detected MAC addresses makes the Bluetooth technology particularly appropriate to monitor the mobility conditions.…”