Efficient Collection of Connected Vehicles Data with Precision Guarantees

Connected vehicles disseminate detailed data, including their position and speed, at a very high frequency. Such data can be used for accurate real-time analysis, prediction and control of transportation systems. The outstanding challenge for such analysis is how to continuously collect and process extremely large volumes of data. To address this challenge, efficient collection of data is critical to prevent overburdening the communication systems and overreaching computational and memory capacity. In this work, we propose an efficient data collection scheme that selects and transmits only a small subset of the data to alleviate data transmission burden. As a demonstration, we have used the proposed approach to select the data points to be transmitted from 10,000 connected vehicles trips available in the Safety Pilot Model Deployment dataset. The presented results show that collection ratio can be as small as 0.05 depending on the required precision. Moreover, a simulation study was performed to evaluate the travel time estimation accuracy using the proposed data collection approach. Results show that the proposed data collection approach can significantly improve travel time estimation accuracy.