Traffic Information system for Mobile Operators:
Requirements and Applications of Traffic Information Services
FCD (floating car data):
Traffic information System on a nationwide basis is an essential part of mobility. There are several ways to collect traffic information, such as road sensors, cameras, etc. However, all these point-detection methods are too expensive to be deployed on a wide scale, which only FCD (floating car data) solutions can handle. FCD is a technology which collects the speed information by tracking the cars (anonymously) while they move on the road, without any road constructions. The leading FCD solutions are aggregating data from mobile phone traveling over the roads for the traffic info. Collecting traffic information from mobile networks is the only known way today to collect enough information samples for real time traffic information system. Data collected from GPS devices alone can't provide enough samples to detect speed changes in real time, but can contribute to some extent to a real time traffic info system based on mobile phone information. The FCD based traffic information system is used by mobile operators, navigation providers, road agencies and other disseminators to provide traffic information services.
Minimum reliability requirements from traffic information service:
As a minimum, traffic information service should report on all slowdowns which create delays of more than 10 minutes during relevant hours. These should be detected and reported within a few minutes only and not later than 10 minutes on most roadways. In order for the traffic information system to comply with such standard, the information in urban areas should be collected for short road segments (0.5 km on average). Average speed difference should be measured against road sensors and floating test vehicles, with up to 10kmh difference in each speed band. (Average speed difference, which is not measured in speed bands, has no meaning, and a system that doesn't detect slowdowns at all can provide less than 10 kph error rate. See explanation in the page "how to test data"). As mentioned above, this level of performance can only be achieved by collecting traffic information from mobile networks.
Traffic Information Services - Applications
Traffic Information System for Mobile Operators:
Traffic information is used by mobile operators as a stand alone application, or in conjunction with mobile navigation service. The type of applications mobile operators are using varies from minimal SMS alerts, through voice alerts and IVR services, map based traffic information and up to dynamic traffic maps that "move" along with the user. Some mobile operators will offer traffic information service under their own brand, while other mobile operators will use 3rd parties to sell the traffic information. Some mobile operators, who are leaders in the area of location based services, combine traffic data extraction from their mobile networks with their traffic information service.
Traffic Information Service for Navigation:
In some metro areas, navigation without traffic information is useless, since the navigation system can direct the driver to a traffic jam of several hours. Traffic information for navigation can be provided in law resolution, through RDS TMC broadcast, or in high resolution, through cellular communication such as GPRS. Navigation systems calculate the quickest route based on the flow data, and also present the user the incident data.
Traffic Information System for Traffic Control Centers:
Many control centers, operated by DOTs or other road agencies, are missing live traffic information system on many of their highways and alternate roads. This can be satisfied by such FCD solution in a couple of months (instead of year of deployment with traditional solutions), with equivalent data reliability and accuracy as road sensors (and even better in some cases), except for late night time, where sampling technologies like FCD don't have enough information to timely identify the speed changes. (However – sensors performance is also degradated significantly in low traffic scenarios).
Note: How can we generate traffic data from mobile phones?
When tracking the same mobile phone over the road (anonymously), every two locations measurements can provide travel time between these locations. All this travel time data over short road segments from all mobile phones can be aggregated to generate the traffic data. The challenge is to get these location measurements accurate enough for traffic data analysis. Regular triangulation on signaling data which flows through the mobile network doesn't work well enough to get traffic data from mobile networks, due to multipath, signal blocking and the nature of the data which the mobile network is utilizing. As a result, many slowdowns will be missed, and long delays might occur before detecting the other slowdowns. There are better ways of calculating location based on this signaling data which is passively extracted from mobile networks, such as pattern matching. For explanation on this approach please visit the TrafficSense product page or contact us.
