01628794

Component

The authors propose a novel way of estimating Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams (MFD), or often also called Network Fundamental Diagrams, from mobile phone signaling data under the condition that vehicles can be identified from the data stream. The authors run a preliminary simulation study to identify whether MFDs can be constructed from this type of data. The authors co-simulate the road traffic in Luxembourg City and one mobile operator’s LTE network user plane, and show that mobile phone base station clusters cover road network partitions of coherent behavior. The results indicate that the relationships between handovers (flow) and attached phones (density) in these base station clusters constitute MFDs. The authors validate the results by comparing estimated velocities in parts of the network to the ground-truth simulated velocities. The results indicate a promising direction for research, as the ubiquity of mobile network infrastructure enables it as a promising, distributed data source for traffic estimation.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Standing Committee on Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics.

01618707

17-05246

English

13p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Cellular telephones; Estimating; Macroscopic traffic flow; Signal processing; Simulation; Traffic density; Urban areas; Validation; Velocity

Luxembourg

Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-05246

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 12:03PM