ANALYZING AND COMPARING TRAFFIC NETWORK CONDITIONS WITH A QUALITY TOOL BASED ON FLOATING CAR AND STATIONARY DATA

Abstract

Cities with medium to high traffic volumes are expected to keep the traffic running in a most efficient way. Accidents, construction sites or large events are counteracting this effort. In addition, cities are facing the fact that traffic signal plans configured and optimized several years ago are no longer suitable for current traffic volumes. Expert knowledge of traffic engineers as well as reports from citizens may help to find out on irregular or inefficient traffic flow. However, in most cases it is fairly impossible to determine whether observed deviations from the expected traffic conditions occur only once, periodically or permanently. Therefore there is a need to explore the causes for the changed traffic flows, and also for evaluating the impacts of construction sites, events, or changed traffic signal control plans in a systematic manner. For tackling this task, a prototype of a traffic quality analysis tool (TQAT) is being developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It is based on a tool which came into operation for the representation of recent traffic conditions during the soccer world championship 2006 in Germany in the police department of Cologne (1). The prototype of the TQAT is set up as an application for the City of Nuremberg within the project ORINOKO.