An Alternative Approach to Travel Time Studies Using GPS Technology

摘要

The traffic flow of the roadway system has great bearing on public safety and health, the natural environment as well as the economy. It is therefore important to monitor the traffic-flow conditions on the roads. Travel time, taken to be the time required to traverse a route between two locations, represents an effective measure of traffic flow conditions. Traditionally, travel-time study follows a cumbersome procedure, which requires tedious record keeping and involves intensive manual operations as well. The statistics commonly employed to characterize traffic flow almost entirely rely on the first-order statistics. This paper can be considered an effort to develop a fundamentally sound data-acquisition procedure that exploits the GPS technology for collecting meaningful travel-time data, accurately and efficiently, in a systematic manner. A random-process based statistical model is proposed for analyzing travel-time data. In addition, analytical and software tools are developed to perform statistical analysis on the travel-time data. The objective is to formulate and obtain meaningful statistics so as to provide realistic measure of traffic flow conditions in a given roadway system.