Intelligent Transportation Systems

Mobile Millennium Final Report

Bayen, Alexandre M.
Butler, Joe
Patire, Anthony D.
2011

Mobile Millennium is a research project that includes a pilot traffic-monitoring system that uses the GPS in cellular phones to gather traffic information, process it, and distribute it back to the phones in real time.

Virtual Trip Lines for Distributed Privacy-Preserving Traffic Monitoring

Hoh, Baik
Gruteser, Marco
Herring, Ryan
Ban, Jeff
Work, Daniel
Bayen, Alexander M.
2008

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...

An Ensemble Kalman Filtering Approach to Highway Traffic Estimation Using GPS Enabled Mobile Devices

Work, Daniel B.
Tossavainen, Olli‐Pekka
Blandin, Sébastien
Bayen, Alexandre M.
Iwuchukwu, Tochukwu
Tracton, Kenneth
2008

Traffic state estimation is a challenging problem for the transportation community due to the limited deployment of sensing infrastructure. However, recent trends in the mobile phone industry suggest that GPS equipped devices will become standard in the next few years. Leveraging these GPS equipped devices as traffic sensors will fundamentally change the type and the quality of traffic data collected on large scales in the near future. New traffic models and data assimilation algorithms must be developed to efficiently transform this data into usable traffic information. In this work, we...

Guaranteed Bounds on Highway Travel Times Using Probe and Fixed Data

Claudel, Christian G.
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2009

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...

Lagrangian sensing: traffic estimation with mobile devices

Work, Daniel B.
Tossavainen, Olli‐Pekka
Jacobson, Quinn
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2009

An inverse modeling algorithm is developed to reconstruct the state of traffic (velocity field) on highways from GPS measurements gathered from mobile phones traveling on-board vehicles. The algorithm is based on ensemble Kalman filtering (EnKF), to overcome the nonlinearity and non-differentiability of a distributed highway traffic model for velocity. The algorithm is implemented in an architecture which includes GPS enabled phones and a privacy aware data collection infrastructure based on the novel concept of virtual trip lines (a technology developed by Nokia). The data collection...

Path and travel time inference from GPS probe vehicle data

Hunter, Timothy
Herring, Ryan
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2009

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...

Lagrangian sensing: traffic estimation with mobile devices

Work, Daniel B.
Tossavainen, Olli‐Pekka
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2009

An inverse modeling algorithm is developed to reconstruct the state of traffic (velocity field) on highways from GPS measurements gathered from mobile phones traveling on-board vehicles. The algorithm is based on ensemble Kalman filtering (EnKF), to overcome the nonlinearity and non-differentiability of a distributed highway traffic model for velocity. The algorithm is implemented in an architecture which includes GPS enabled phones and a privacy aware data collection infrastructure based on the novel concept of virtual trip lines (a technology developed by Nokia). The data...

Optimal Sensor Placement for Freeway Travel Time Estimation

Ban, Xuegang (Jeff)
Bayen, Alexandre M.
Herring, Ryan
2009

This article presents a modeling framework and a polynomial solution algorithm for determining optimal locations of point detectors used to compute freeway travel times. First, an objective function is introduced to minimize the deviation of estimated and actual travel times of all individual sub-segments of a freeway route. By discretizing the problem in both time and space, we formulate it as a dynamic programming model, which can be solved via a shortest path search in an acyclic graph. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the model and algorithm using microscopic traffic...

Using Mobile Phones to Forecast Arterial Traffic through Statistical Learning

Herring, Ryan
Hofleitner, Aude
Amin, Saurabh
Abou Nasr, Tania
Khalek, Amin Abdel
Abbeel, Pieter
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2010

This article introduces the new component of Mobile Millennium dedicated to arterial traffic. Mobile Millennium is a pilot system for collecting, processing and broadcasting real-time traffic conditions through the use of global position system (GPS) equipped smartphones. Two algorithms that use data from GPS equipped smartphones to estimate arterial traffic conditions are presented, analyzed and compared. The algorithms are based on Logistic Regression and Spatio-Temporal Auto Regressive Moving Average (STARMA), respectively. Each algorithm contains a learning component, which...

A Traffic Model for Velocity Data Assimilation

Work, Daniel B.
Blandin, Sébastien
Tossavainen, Olli‐Pekka
Piccoli, Benedetto
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2010

This article is motivated by the practical problem of highway traffic estimation using velocity measurements from GPS enabled mobile devices such as cell phones. In order to simplify the estimation procedure, a velocity model for highway traffic is constructed, which results in a dynamical system in which the observation operator is linear. This article presents a new scalar hyperbolic partial differential equation (PDE) model for traffic velocity evolution on highways, based on the seminal Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) PDE for density. Equivalence of the solution of the new velocity...