Evaluation Method for Accuracy of Road Traffic State Information

Most achieved evaluation methods for accuracy in traffic engineering are designed to evaluate the determinable quantum, such as evaluation method for traffic incident identification. Those methods can hardly be used in evaluating the accuracy of road traffic state information, since it is a fuzzy variable that different drivers may have various identifications for the same traffic condition. For this problem, this paper presents a user-based evaluation method, namely driver-based evaluation method. Based on the drivers' evaluation, a benchmark traffic state can be got by using an adjacency principle and the accuracy of traffic state information can be analyzed. The driver-based evaluation method can solve the fuzziness in the traffic state identification, and provide a benchmark traffic state which is associated with most drivers' opinions. Also a case study is presented in this paper to test this method. This evaluation approach can be used both as a means to amend the parameters of existent identification model and as a principle for choosing a better algorithm for the traffic state identification. Moreover, the user-based evaluation method can be suggested to evaluate the fuzzy variables in other fields.