Evaluation of Stationary, Link-based and Floating Vehicle Data for Estimating Travel Times on Freeways

Abstract Travel time measurements are an important indicator for evaluating traffic flow conditions or the effectiveness of various traffic management and control measures and thus their accuracy is of great importance. This paper compares travel time measurements from four different data sources including Floating Vehicle Data (FVD), local detectors, CONSYST data and Bluetooth re-identification. The different data sources are evaluated depending on their penetration (for FVD and Bluetooth) and detection (for inductive loops) rates, the vehicle composition as well as their travel time values on different days. Travel time values are compared for days with and without an incident occurrence separately, as the traffic evolution significantly differs. Firstly, data source characteristics are identified based on the observation of travel time plots and differences and similarities are further assessed and estimated via statistical analysis and pairwise comparison. Finally, a statistical analysis and pairwise comparison are conducted to determine the travel time correlations between all data sources on different days and under various traffic conditions.