Title: An averaging approach to estimate urban traffic speed using large-scale origin-destination data

Authors: Darui Zhang; Andrej Ivanco; Zoran Filipi

Addresses: Department of Automotive Engineering, Clemson University, 4 Research Drive Greenville, SC 29607, USA ' Department of Automotive Engineering, Clemson University, 4 Research Drive Greenville, SC 29607, USA ' Department of Automotive Engineering, Clemson University, 4 Research Drive Greenville, SC 29607, USA

Abstract: Knowledge about the driving condition can be exploited by the energy management system of plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) to optimise its fuel economy. However, estimating urban traffic speed can be a challenging problem, since the complexity of the road network requires a large amount of sensing coverage. GPS equipped vehicles have been used to address this problem, despite the drawback of high transmission cost due to the periodic locations reporting during the entire trip. This paper presents an alternative method to estimate urban traffic speed when only the trip distance, origin, destination and trip time are known, without the detailed information about the vehicle trajectory. Taxicab fleet data is used due to its wide area-coverage and large data availability. One month (15 million) observations of taxi origin-destination data in New York City is processed using cluster computers to create a traffic speed model of Manhattan at different times of day. The developed average traffic speed model is able to accurately predict the recorded trip duration from the taxicab data, and therefore, can be used to estimate energy consumption and optimise PHEV control.

Keywords: traffic speed estimation; energy management systems; EMS; global positioning systems; GPS; origin-destination data; plug-in hybrid electric vehicles; PHEV; hybrid vehicles; telematics; traffic congestion; Manhattan; travel energy prediction; parallel computing; taxicabs; taxis; USA; United States; urban traffic; cities; driving conditions; fuel economy; trip distance; trip origin; trip destination; trip time; trip duration; vehicle control; energy consumption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPT.2015.070375

International Journal of Powertrains, 2015 Vol.4 No.2, pp.126 - 140

Received: 01 Apr 2014
Accepted: 08 Nov 2014
Published online: 03 Jul 2015 *

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