Assessment of floating car data quality for emission estimation

Abstract

This paper presents a method for assessing the quality of floating car data and estimating emissions of the road network. The authors use a fundamental diagram from real probe vehicles to determine the categorization of the road network. These data are complemented by the widely used emission factors of the COPERT model to investigate the quality of the floating vehicle data to use them for the determination of emissions on individual road classes with a detailed spatiotemporal resolution. From the same data, an estimate of the emission rate of the categories is determined and it is assessed whether similar differences are exhibited. The hypothesis is that the quality of data is quite sufficient on highways and high-class roads, but unusable and insufficient on low-class roads. The results show that differences in emission estimates can be observed for the road categories of the highway network and low-class road network. For some pollutants, the urban network can also be identified. The offered categorization could lead to further possibilities of using floating vehicle data, such as the assumption of the possibility to detect atypical traffic phenomena (traffic jams, accidents, or impassable roads due to bad weather conditions).