Representative truck activity patterns from anonymous mobile sensor data

Abstract

• Anonymous Global Positioning System data can be mined for truck activity patterns. • Stop and trip characteristics of a truck represent its daily activity pattern. • Truck operational types can be represented by six unique daily activity patterns. With new sources of big data, it is increasingly possible to practically implement advanced freight forecasting models including activity-based and truck touring models. Such models improve upon traditional trip-based approaches by capturing freight behaviors sensitive to transportation policy and infrastructure changes. A persistent challenge with the use of big data in this context is the ability to generalize a set of representative behaviors to serve as the basis for model calibration and validation from anonymized data depicting the complex behaviors of the population. To address this challenge, we present a two-stage methodology to extract unique and representative freight activity patterns from passively collected truck Global Positioning System (GPS) data. The first stage involved a heuristic-based approach to derive a set of stop and trip characteristics from large-streams of GPS pings. The second stage employed data mining and machine learning techniques to discern common freight activity patterns from the set of defined features. The resulting activity pattern profiles, defined as chains of activities and their trajectories over time and space, allow us to maintain the anonymity of the trucks included in the GPS dataset while providing high-resolution travel profiles- a necessary condition for most data sharing agreements between public agencies and private data providers. These activity patterns serve as the critical, and currently missing, data needed to calibrate and validate advanced freight forecasting models. With more advanced forecasting models reflective of observed freight behaviors, we will be able to evaluate a wider spectrum of policy and infrastructure scenarios more accurately.