Building the Traffic Flow Network with Taxi GPS Trajectories and Its Application to Identify Urban Congestion Areas for Traffic Planning

Jiayu Qin,Gang Mei,Lei Xiao

doi:10.3390/su13010266

Abstract

Traffic congestion is becoming a critical problem in urban traffic planning. Intelligent transportation systems can help expand the capacity of urban roads to alleviate traffic congestion. As a key concept in intelligent transportation systems, urban traffic networks, especially dynamic traffic networks, can serve as potential solutions for traffic congestion, based on the complex network theory. In this paper, we build a traffic flow network model to investigate traffic congestion problems through taxi GPS trajectories. Moreover, to verify the effectiveness of the traffic flow network, an actual case of identifying the congestion areas is considered. The results indicate that the traffic flow network is reliable. Finally, several key problems related to traffic flow networks are discussed. The proposed traffic flow network can provide a methodological reference for traffic planning, especially to solve traffic congestion problems.

Highlights

Building the Traffic Flow NetworkTraffic congestion is a major problem in traffic planning
We build a new traffic flow network model to investigate the traffic congestion problems based on taxi global positioning system (GPS) trajectories
The results of identifying the congestion nodes are consistent in the aforementioned areas. These results demonstrate the similarity of the four metrics in identifying the congestion areas, which reflects the reliability of the four local metrics

Summary

Introduction

Building the Traffic Flow NetworkTraffic congestion is a major problem in traffic planning. Several researchers have attempted to solve traffic congestion problems by applying intelligent transportation systems [1,2]. An urban traffic network can be divided into the urban static and dynamic traffic networks [7,8,9] based on the topological structure of the urban roads and actual traffic flow. Both the static and dynamic networks exhibit the characteristics of complex networks [10,11]. An urban traffic network includes an urban static and dynamic traffic network

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion