A method to estimate traffic penetration rates of commercial floating car data using speed information

Abstract

Floating Car Data (FCD) are being increasingly used as an alternative traffic data source due to its lower cost and high coverage area. FCD can be obtained by tracking vehicle trajectories individually or by processing multiple tracks anonymously to produce average speed information commercially. For commercial FCD, the spatio-temporal distribution of these vehicles in actual traffic, traffic Penetration Rate (PR) is the most important factor affecting the accuracy of speed estimations, despite the high number of registered vehicles feeding to an FCD provider, denoting the market PR. This study proposes a method for assessing the traffic PR of commercial FCD by evaluating its speed estimation quality compared to Ground Truth (GT) data. GT speed data were employed to generate different levels of traffic PR using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, which resulted in the development of Quality-PR (Q-PR) relations for Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) as selected Measures of Effectiveness (MoE). Simulation-based FCD results at an urban road segment in Ankara (Turkey) showed that a quality of FCD with traffic PR of 15% or more would improve significantly. Use of the developed Q-PR relations suggested an approximately 5% traffic PR for the commercial FCD speeds at the location.

Keywords

• commercial floating car data
• floating car data quality
• penetration rate
• probe vehicle
• Monte Carlo simulations