TY - JOUR
T1 - Evaluation of traffic data obtained via GPS-enabled mobile phones
T2 - The Mobile Century field experiment
AU - Herrera, Juan C.
AU - Work, Daniel B.
AU - Herring, Ryan
AU - Ban, Xuegang (Jeff)
AU - Jacobson, Quinn
AU - Bayen, Alexandre M.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank Ken Tracton, Toch Iwuchukwu, Dave Sutter, and Murali Annavaram at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, Baik Hoh and Marco Gruteser of Winlab at Rutgers University, and Christian Claudel of UC Berkeley for their invaluable contributions to develop, build, and deploy the traffic monitoring system implemented as part of the Mobile Century experiment. We thank the staff of the California Center for Innovative Transportation for the Mobile Century logistics planning and successful implementation. This research was supported by the Federal and California DOTs, Nokia, Center for Future Urban Transport at UC Berkeley (a Volvo International Center of Excellence), the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes), the National Science Foundation under contract CNS-0615299, and the US Department of Transportation through the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program.
PY - 2010/8
Y1 - 2010/8
N2 - The growing need of the driving public for accurate traffic information has spurred the deployment of large scale dedicated monitoring infrastructure systems, which mainly consist in the use of inductive loop detectors and video cameras. On-board electronic devices have been proposed as an alternative traffic sensing infrastructure, as they usually provide a cost-effective way to collect traffic data, leveraging existing communication infrastructure such as the cellular phone network. A traffic monitoring system based on GPS-enabled smartphones exploits the extensive coverage provided by the cellular network, the high accuracy in position and velocity measurements provided by GPS devices, and the existing infrastructure of the communication network. This article presents a field experiment nicknamed Mobile Century, which was conceived as a proof of concept of such a system. Mobile Century included 100 vehicles carrying a GPS-enabled Nokia N95 phone driving loops on a 10-mile stretch of I-880 near Union City, California, for 8. h. Data were collected using virtual trip lines, which are geographical markers stored in the handset that probabilistically trigger position and speed updates when the handset crosses them. The proposed prototype system provided sufficient data for traffic monitoring purposes while managing the privacy of participants. The data obtained in the experiment were processed in real-time and successfully broadcast on the internet, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed system for real-time traffic monitoring. Results suggest that a 2-3% penetration of cell phones in the driver population is enough to provide accurate measurements of the velocity of the traffic flow. Data presented in this article can be downloaded from http://traffic.berkeley.edu.
AB - The growing need of the driving public for accurate traffic information has spurred the deployment of large scale dedicated monitoring infrastructure systems, which mainly consist in the use of inductive loop detectors and video cameras. On-board electronic devices have been proposed as an alternative traffic sensing infrastructure, as they usually provide a cost-effective way to collect traffic data, leveraging existing communication infrastructure such as the cellular phone network. A traffic monitoring system based on GPS-enabled smartphones exploits the extensive coverage provided by the cellular network, the high accuracy in position and velocity measurements provided by GPS devices, and the existing infrastructure of the communication network. This article presents a field experiment nicknamed Mobile Century, which was conceived as a proof of concept of such a system. Mobile Century included 100 vehicles carrying a GPS-enabled Nokia N95 phone driving loops on a 10-mile stretch of I-880 near Union City, California, for 8. h. Data were collected using virtual trip lines, which are geographical markers stored in the handset that probabilistically trigger position and speed updates when the handset crosses them. The proposed prototype system provided sufficient data for traffic monitoring purposes while managing the privacy of participants. The data obtained in the experiment were processed in real-time and successfully broadcast on the internet, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed system for real-time traffic monitoring. Results suggest that a 2-3% penetration of cell phones in the driver population is enough to provide accurate measurements of the velocity of the traffic flow. Data presented in this article can be downloaded from http://traffic.berkeley.edu.
KW - GPS-enabled cell phones
KW - Mobile sensors
KW - Traffic monitoring systems
KW - Traffic sensors
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U2 - 10.1016/j.trc.2009.10.006
DO - 10.1016/j.trc.2009.10.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77952675249
SN - 0968-090X
VL - 18
SP - 568
EP - 583
JO - Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies
JF - Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies
IS - 4
ER -