Spatio-Temporal Reachable Area Calculation Based on Urban Traffic Data

The spatio-temporal reachable area that can be reached by driving vehicles from a specific starting location at starting time during a given time period is widely used in urban applications, such as the online ride-hailing service and the charging station seeking by an electric car. Existing studies on this issue usually utilize the static road network, which implies the spatial features, whereas the temporal characteristics of the dynamic urban traffic have not been explored in depth. In this article, we propose a spatio-temporal reachable area calculation scheme, named STRC, based on a tremendous amount of vehicle trajectory data. In STRC, the objective trajectory fragments are extracted according to the starting node and the query time period, and then mapped to reachable nodes to reduce the computational complexity. From those reachable road segments having reachable nodes on, a boundary segment is selected in each sector area by using the arrival-based one segment policy for time-sensitive applications or the arrival-and-distance-based k -segment policy for distance-related applications. The experiments based on large-scale trajectory data from 34 040 taxis in Beijing for one month show that STRC outputs more accurate reachable area, which covers the trajectory points with much smaller area, than compared schemes.