Accurate estimation of travel times from single-loop detectors

Accurate estimation of travel times from single-loop detectors

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Article ID: iaor19982823
Country: United Kingdom
Volume: 32A
Issue: 1
Start Page Number: 1
End Page Number: 17
Publication Date: Jan 1998
Journal: Transportation Research. Part A, Policy and Practice
Authors: , , , , , ,
Keywords: queues: applications, stochastic processes
Abstract:

As advanced traveler information systems become increasingly prevalent the importance of accurately estimating link travel times grows. Unfortunately, the predominant source of highway traffic information comes from single-loop loop detectors which do not directly measure vehicle speed. The conventional method of estimating speed, and hence travel time, from the single-loop data is to make a common vehicle length assumption and to use a resulting identity relating density, flow, and speed. Hall and Persaud and Pushkar et al. show that these speed estimates are flawed. In this paper we present a methodology to estimate link travel times directly from the single-loop loop detector flow and occupancy data without heavy reliance on the flawed speed calculations. Our methods arise naturally from an intuitive stochastic model of traffic flow. We demonstrate by example on data collected on I-880 data that when the loop detector data have a fine resolution (about one second), the single-loop based estimates of travel time can accurately track the true travel time through many degrees of congestion. Probe vehicle data and double-loop based travel time estimates corroborate the accuracy of our methods in our examples.

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