Dynamic Travel Time Maps

Abstract

The application domain of intelligent transportation is plagued by a shortage of data sources that adequately assess traffic situations. Currently, to provide routing and navigation solutions an unreliable travel time database that consists of static weights as derived from road categories and speed limits is used for road networks. With the advent of Floating Car Data (FCD) and specifically the GPS-based tracking data component, a means was found to derive accurate and up-to-date travel times, i.e., qualitative traffic information. FCD is a by-product in fleet management applications and given a minimum number and uniform distribution of vehicles, this data can be used for accurate traffic assessment and also prediction. Map-matching the tracking data produces travel time data related to a specific edge in the road network. The Dynamic Travel Time Map (DTTM) is introduced as a means to efficiently supply dynamic weights that are derived from a collection of historic travel times. The DTTM is realized as a spatiotemporal data warehouse.