Road Network Running State Reliability Estimation Based on Travel Time Interval

Travel time reliability is a crucial factor for drivers to determine driving mode, driving route, and departure time. However, wide use of travel time reliability mostly is to describe distribution characteristics of travel time. The index is not intuitive and lacks considerations of predictability of travel time series. In order to evaluate traffic service level at different traffic running states, road network evaluation based on travel time reliability is proposed. Based on existing travel time reliability studies, one new concept of travel time reliability interval is proposed in this paper; the new index considers drivers’ driving behavior, distribution characteristics of travel time, and predictability of travel time series. Applied to a practical road network, the experiment results show that travel time reliability can accurately reflect the practical running state of traffic and variation characteristics of travel time.