Integrating the Directional Effect of Traffic into Geostatistical Approaches for Travel Time Estimation

With the direct linkage to a travel map system, geostatistical techniques have been recently adopted for urban travel time estimation. Some important traffic characteristics of urban transportation networks, however, have not been adequately addressed in these studies. As an improvement over the existing studies, this study incorporates the directional effect of traffic into several commonly used geostatistical models for travel time estimation. We show that model performance can be significantly enhanced when flow specific properties are explicitly considered in constructing the associated interpolation models. The developed methodology is applied to a set of traffic data collected in the city of Tucson, Arizona during the rush hours. Results demonstrate an average of 20 % reduction in RMSE compared with those by the traditional approaches. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.