Intelligent Transportation Systems

Technical and economic investigations of automated highway systems (AHS) are addressed. It has generally been accepted that such systems show potential to alleviate urban traffic congestion, so most of the AHS research has been focused instead on technical design and implementation issues. It is demonstrated that, despite making a number of assumptions that are favorable to AHS, the actual viable implementation opportunities for AHS are scarce, and that most existing congested urban areas can be disqualified on the basis of at least one criterion developed herein. Technical investigations...

Automotive traffic monitoring using probe vehicles with Global Positioning System receivers promises significant improvements in cost, coverage, and accuracy. Current approaches, however, raise privacy concerns because they require participants to reveal their positions to an external traffic monitoring server. To address this challenge, we propose a system based on virtual trip lines and an associated cloaking technique. Virtual trip lines are geographic markers that indicate where vehicles should provide location updates. These markers can be placed to avoid particularly privacy...

This article investigates the problem of incorporating mobile probe data collected from GPS equipped cell phones into estimation algorithms for travel time. We use kinematic wave theory to create a modeling framework capable of incorporating trajectory data into the model. The problem of including loop detector data in this model is performed using a standard approach available in the literature. The problem of fusing this data with probe data is formulated using the Moskowitz function, which results from kinematic wave theory. Using this formulation, two linear programs are posed to...

We consider the problem of estimating real-time traffic conditions from sparse, noisy GPS probe vehicle data. We specifically address arterial roads, which are also known as the secondary road network (highways are considered the primary road network). We consider several estimation problems: historical traffic patterns, real-time traffic conditions, and forecasting future traffic conditions. We assume that the data available for these estimation problems is a small set of sparsely traced vehicle trajectories, which represents a small fraction of the total vehicle flow through the network. We...