Wide-area vehicle trajectory data based on advanced tracking and trajectory splicing technologies: Potentials in transportation research

Abstract

Trajectory data of road users play a crucial role in transportation engineering and traffic safety research. Previous vehicle trajectory data, including naturalistic driving data, trajectory data captured by drones and traffic cameras, have greatly promoted the research of traffic safety, traffic simulation, and other transportation engineering fields. However, existing technologies in collecting trajectory data are limited their detection range. With the development of the sensing and tracking technologies, it is possible to track the trajectory information of road users at the wide-area level, i.e., the real-time trajectory data of all road users on the entire road. Recently, we published our data sharing platform, Tongji Road Trajectory Sharing (TJRD TS, available online at https://tjrdts.com) Platform, providing our open wide-area vehicle trajectory data for researchers, academics, and road traffic professionals. Advanced vehicle tracking and trajectory splicing technologies, such as millimeter wave radar and edge computing technology, were employed to obtain such wide-area vehicle trajectory data. In this short communication article, we brainstorm ideas of using wide-area vehicle trajectory data in traffic safety research, traffic efficiency research, and connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) application. We hope this short communication and our published data sharing platform can serve as the steppingstone for those who are interested in road transportation engineering and road safety research using such wide-area vehicle trajectory data.