Evaluation of Cellular Probe Traffic Data: Issues and Case Study

While cellular probe traffic data shows its great potential in applications of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), especially, the Traveler Information System (TIS), the data quality becomes a more and more important issue for real world application. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the issues in probe data evaluation and their potential solution approaches. The selections of data source, sampling strategies and data analysis techniques can be complicated problems. A case study is presented. It is observed in the study that cellular probe traffic data provide ideal spatial and temporal coverage and the precision of the cellular probe traffic travel times on freeways qualifies immediate ITS application. It indicates that it is necessary to further improve the algorithm on arterials and to coordinate signal setting within the algorithm. With future improvement of cellular probe technology, ITS applications will be further benefited.