Map‐matching algorithm applied to bicycle global positioning system traces in Bologna

Abstract

A novel map-matching algorithm is proposed, implemented and applied to global positioning system (GPS) traces which have been recorded by cyclists in Bologna, a medium-sized city in the North of Italy. The algorithm has been developed to match geo-referenced traces to a sequence of edges of a given road network model. Map-matching for bike trips is particularly challenging as cyclists often use footpath or parks which are not necessarily represented by the road network model. The matching algorithm should smartly tolerate the lack of network information. The algorithm should also be fast and capable of processing thousands of GPS traces in a reasonable time. The proposed probability-based method, which also exploits information on various network attributes, allows a reliable and fast map matching, even in dense street networks and with interrupted GPS data streams. In fact, one serious issue is to find a reliability measure which allows to verify the matched routes, without the knowledge of the real routes, as the available cyclist traces are anonymous. In addition to the reliability check, a sensitivity analyses with respect to the most relevant parameters has been conducted. The advantages of the proposed map-matching algorithm are quantified through a direct comparison with a topology-based map-matching algorithm from literature.

A force-directed approach for offline GPS trajectory map matching

“…We first used the method proposed by [26] to evaluate map matches for bicycle paths in Bologna: we calculate the length index I L , which is defined by dividing the length of the matched route R by the line-interpolated length of the GPS trace:…”

“…Recently, improvements on these methods have been proposed, such as an efficient buffer topological algorithm to detect bicycle paths in Bologna [26], or a score-based matching for car trajectories in Zurich [21]. The ACM SIGSPATIAL 2012 competition [1,13,18,28,30,31,35] requested participants to determine a fast map matching algorithm for use in real-time systems; the focus of the competition was on algorithm speed since the competition used only ten vehicle trajectories and the provided instances were relatively easy to solve (good quality GPS points on a not very dense road network).…”

“…This suggests that map matches that are close to the original points are considered to be more accurate than those which are farther away. Some alternatives for the evaluation of map matching algorithms in the absence of ground truth include the comparison of the length of the original trajectory compared the the length of the matched route [26]. Finally, an interesting approach [24], although with limited practical use, is to collect two sets of GPS data, one of low quality used as the input trace and a second trace of high quality data used as a proxy for the ground truth.…”

Evaluating Urban Bicycle Infrastructures through Intersubjectivity of Stress Sensations Derived from Physiological Measurements

“…The main concept was to detect node traversals and possible detours in trajectory data by computing the intersection between GPS samples and buffers around nodes. An example with similar context, where buffer intersection was used for map matching, can be found in [47]. A major difference is that we applied buffers around nodes instead of edges.…”

Data-Driven Bicycle Network Analysis Based on Traditional Counting Methods and GPS Traces from Smartphone

“…In order to match the GPS points to network links with a high accuracy and to obtain a large number of correctly matched GPS traces, the entire map-matching analysis consists of 4 phases: (i) an initial filtering process, (ii) the actual map matching process itself, (iii) a post-filtering process and (iv) a final analysis of the matched routes. The employed map matching algorithm is based on a method proposed by Marchal et al [22] and improved by Schweizer et al [23]. Initially, many GPS traces could not be matched to the network due to missing links or missing access.…”