Map matching for fixed sensor data based on utility theory

Abstract

Map matching can provide useful traffic information by aligning the observed trajectories of vehicles with the road network on a digital map. It has an essential role in many advanced intelligent traffic systems (ITSs). Unfortunately, almost all current mapmatching approaches were developed for GPS trajectories generated by probe sensors mounted in a few vehicles and cannot deal with the trajectories of massive vehicle samples recorded by fixed sensors, such as camera detectors. In this paper, we propose a novel map-matching model termed Fixed-MM, which is designed specifically for fixed sensor data. Based on two key observations from real-world data, Fixed-MM considers (1) the utility of each path and (2) the travel time constraint to match the trajectories of fixed sensor data to a specific path. Meanwhile, with the laws derived from the distribution of GPS trajectories, a path generation algorithm was developed to search for candidates. The proposed Fixed-MM was examined with field-test data. The experimental results show that Fixed-MM outperforms two types of classical map-matching algorithms regarding accuracy and efficiency when fixed sensor data are used. The proposed Fixed-MM can identify 68.38% of the links correctly, even when the spatial gap between the sensor pair is increased to five kilometers. The average computation time spent by Fixed-MM on one point is only 0.067 s, and we argue that the proposed method can be used online for many real-time ITS applications.