Bluetooth Vehicle Trajectory by Fusing Bluetooth and Loops: Motorway Travel Time Statistics

Abstract

Loop detectors are widely used on the motorway networks where they provide point speed and traffic volumes. Models have been proposed for temporal and spatial generalization of speed for average travel time estimation. Advancement in technology provides complementary data sources such as Bluetooth Media Access Control (MAC) Scanner (BMS), detecting the MAC ID of the Bluetooth devices transported by the traveler. Matching the data from two BMS stations provides individual vehicle travel time. Generally, on the motorways, loops are closely spaced, whereas BMSs are placed a few kilometers apart. In this paper, we fuse BMSs and loops data to define the trajectories of the Bluetooth vehicles. The trajectories are utilized to estimate the travel time statistics between any two points along the motorway. The proposed model is tested using simulation and validated with real data from Pacific Motorway, Brisbane. Comparing the model with the linear-interpolation-based trajectory provides significant improvements.