Monitoring Traffic and Emissions by Floating Car Data

Abstract

Intelligent raffic mangement is widely acknowledged as a means to optimise the utilisation of existing infrastructure capacities. A major requirement intelligent traffic management is the collection of high quality data on traffic conditions in order to generate accurate real-time traffic information. The approach to be described here generates this information by a fleet of taxis equipped with GPS which act as Floating-Car-Data (FCD) provider for a number of metropolitan areas. The first part of this paper describes the methodology of setting up this data base. The information collected enables various applications such as real-time traffic monitoring, time-dynamic routing and fleet management. The second part of the paper proposes a framwork for using these data additionally to include environmental effects into intelligent traffic managemnt systems. To this end, a mapping between travel times and traffic flows is proposed. Some challenges related to the computation of emissions from velocity profiles are discussed. Equipped thes ingredients, an environmental friendly intelligent traffic management might be in reach.