Data Collection of Freeway Travel Time Ground Truth with Bluetooth Sensors

Abstract

Accurate travel time information is essential to the effective management of traffic conditions. Traditionally, floating car data have been used as the primary source of ground truth for measuring the quality of real-time travel time provided by traffic surveillance systems. This paper introduces Bluetooth sensors as a new and effective means of data collection of freeway ground truth travel time. The concept of vehicle identification using Bluetooth signatures for travel time estimation along a section of freeway is explained. Issues related to error analysis, filtering of raw matched data, and accuracy of the resulting ground truth compared with floating car are discussed. Data from loop detectors on several freeway segments are used to approximate and report the average sampling rate of Bluetooth sensors. Results show that the new technology is a promising method for collecting high-quality travel time data that can be used as ground truth for evaluating other sources of travel time and other intelligent transportation system applications.