TPEG feed from the BBC: a potential source of ITS data?

Abstract

The provision of traffic and travel information has long been at the centre of development of Intelligent Transport System (ITS). TPEG (Transport Protocol Expert Group) is a new standard format for delivering real-time traffic information to drivers over digital radio channels. TPEG is considered to be a replacement to the current RDS-TMC standard in the future, which is currently used by in-car navigation systems. TPEG standard also specifies an XML format (tpegML) for delivery over the Internet. The BBC has launched a pilot service that delivers a live feed of incident, congestion and roadwork information in tpegML format through their website. This makes it a potential data source for ITS applications deployed on a wide range of platforms. The provenance and quality of the information provided by this feed is examined in this paper. An investigation into the source of this data will give an understanding of how the data disseminated through the feed are generated. Quality of the data is determined using the following four criteria: spatial coverage, frequency of information provided by the feed, latency and accuracy this information. To enable us to carry out this study, a program was written to download the tpegML feed from the BBC website every 15 minutes. The feed was downloaded using the program for six months, and filtered to obtain information for the London area (the region within M25). The filtered data were archived in a database for offline analysis. The results presented in this paper were obtained from this database. In addition to the live tpegML feed, it is envisioned that the historic incident database will also be a potential data source for ITS applications and traffic research. We conclude the paper by outlining a number of potential ITS applications that can make use of online and archived TPEG data.