Development of a tool for determining speed and road directions using GPS vehicle devices and free resources

摘要

Vehicle GPS devices in countries like Ecuador have increased, meaning that new GPS data is collected every day (for example the data provided for this work, collected from a 50 buses fleet in the city of Portoviejo, Ecuador). This data can later become (if processed) information corresponding to road networks.Although GPS data is available as text files, to acquire useful information from it there must exist a tool developed for this matter, accessible to common users (using free resources), and able to process it and provide a usable completed road network as a result.This work intends to provide a tool to perform this processing, using free resources, such as Python, Quantum GIS (QGIS) and OpenStreetMap (OSM). An algorithm was developed to acquire road direction and speed average information, using provided GPS data from vehicles. For this, OSM plugin from QGIS was modified, through Python geoprocessing capabilities. A testing phase was designed and implemented to try out algorithms performance, and hardware capacity, specially handling large files.During this testing phase programming errors appeared obligating to correct these issues until processing was done correctly. Results demonstrated that road direction and speed average information can be acquired, despite events that can confuse the tool.