Automatic relocation of link related data in an updated road map

For a rising number of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications, location information obtained by the processing of sensor data is related to the links of a specific digital road map. Such maps are available from different vendors like Here, TomTom/TeleAtlas and OpenStreetMap (OSM). They are created with different philosophies, resulting in significant differences in the geometry and the topology of the road networks. If a map needs to be updated to a new release, the user faces the problem that a relocation of any annotated location data, i.e. a proper mapping of these locations from the old to the new map becomes necessary. For this reason, German Aerospace Center (DLR) developed an accurate, general method for inter map matching and a new software application called “DataRelocator@Map2Map” has been based on it. It enables the automatic relocation of location data between the two maps. Using the new tool, an almost fully automatic relocation is possible and thus the cost of service failures related to the map update can be avoided.