Dynamic Wide-Area Congestion and Incident Monitoring Using Probe Data

Abstract

Traffic congestion and overall performance monitoring of roadways continues to be a major initiative of departments of transportation and planning boards nationwide. Information from traffic monitoring programs has direct relevance to both analysts and the general public. Traditional data analysis tools and methods in this area fail to connect congestion data with incident and event data and thus make the task of determining the causes of congestion difficult in many cases. As more traffic data are collected, the need for tools that can facilitate effective visualization of this data, both archived and real time, is becoming increasingly apparent. The proposed congestion and incident scanner tool is a web-based application that affords dynamic and interactive analysis of traffic congestion conditions. The tool provides an intuitive, minimalistic interface for generating congestion performance visualizations for specific date ranges and locations. These visualizations improve on existing tools by allowing users to interact with and manipulate the visualizations to better highlight specific areas of interest. The integration of incident and traffic event data with visualization allows users to easily correlate congestion abnormalities with possible causes as well as evaluate the full effects of events, such as roadwork and major incidents, on traffic conditions.

Real-time identification of probe vehicle trajectories in the mixed traffic corridor

“…Traffic state estimation and prediction was one of the basic applications (De Fabritiis et al, 2008;Kong et al, 2013;Lund and Pack, 2010;Pu et al, 2009). Another application of probe vehicle systems was updating digital road maps, which had the advantages of low cost, short updating circle and high accuracy Vartziotis et al, 2012).…”

Generating Reliable Freight Performance Measures with Truck GPS Data

“…With the prevalence of GPS receivers on vehicles and portable navigation devices, using probe vehicle data for travel time analysis has been increasingly attractive to the transportation community. The GPS-based vehicle location information has been used to estimate traffic states and derive travel time information for traffic monitoring (14)(15)(16)(17)(18). Probe vehicle data, when fused with loop detector data and other data sources, can provide more complete and continuous coverage for monitoring traffic (14).…”

“…The GPS-based vehicle location information has been used to estimate traffic states and derive travel time information for traffic monitoring (14)(15)(16)(17)(18). Probe vehicle data, when fused with loop detector data and other data sources, can provide more complete and continuous coverage for monitoring traffic (14). Turner et al outlined the primary data requirements for congestion-related performance measures and introduced core data elements and various metadata to ensure data consistency among data providers (19).…”

Enhancing the Value of an Incidents Database with an Interactive Visualization Tool

“…Multimedia dissemination of origin-destination survey data has been initiated by Chapleau et al (1997). Several web-based visualization tools have been developed at the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory (CATT LAB) of the University of Maryland, among which some allow the visualization of incidents (Wongsuphasawat et al 2009) and try to identify correlations between incidents and congestion (Lund et al 2010). In a more general framework, MacEachren's cube (MacEachren, 1995) details the multiple roles of visualization according to the audience (public vs. private/technical), the objective (presenting known facts vs. discovering patterns), and the level of interactivity (high vs. low).…”