Estimating freeway traffic measures from mobile phone location data

The worldwide propagation of mobile phone and the rapid development of location technologies have provided the chance to monitor freeway traffic conditions without requiring extra infrastructure investment. Over the past decade, a number of research studies and operational tests have attempted to investigate the methods to estimate traffic measures using information from mobile phone. However, most of these works ignored the fact that each vehicle has more than one phone due to the rapid popularity of mobile phone. This paper considered the circumstance of multi-phones and proposed a relatively simplistic clustering technique to identify whether phones travel in the same vehicle. By using this technique, mobile phone data can be used to determine not only speed, but also vehicle counts by type, and therefore density. A complex simulation covering different traffic condition and location accuracy of mobile phone has been developed to evaluate the proposed approach. Simulation results indicate that location accuracy of mobile phone is a crucial factor to estimate accurate traffic measures in case of a given location frequency and the number of continuous location data. In addition, traffic demand and clustering method have a certain effect on the accuracy of traffic measures.