Minimum Sample Size Determination of Floating Cars in an Urban Hybrid Network

Abstract

Floating cars are being widely used in urban dynamic traffic data collection, so it is of great significance to determine the appropriate floating car sample size to ensure the reliability of dynamic traffic data. This paper emphatically analyzed the determination method of floating car sample size under different traffic flow parameters, and then the minimum sample size calculation model was proposed under the urban hybrid network, typical city such as Beijing is calculated by the model as well. The path planning algorithm was adopt to verify the validity of the model by calculate floating car numbers distribution in road segments, origin and destination (OD) points used in the path planning were randomly selected from road network. The experimental results demonstrate that the method can effectively satisfy the estimated minimum number of floating cars under the certain accuracy requirement of dynamic traffic information.