Road Congestion Detection Based on Trajectory Stay-Place Clustering

Abstract

The results of road congestion detection can be used for the rational planning of travel routes and as guidance for traffic management. The trajectory data of moving objects can record their positions at each moment and reflect their moving features. Utilizing trajectory mining technology to effectively identify road congestion locations is of great importance and has practical value in the fields of traffic and urban planning. This paper addresses the issue by proposing a novel approach to detect road congestion locations based on trajectory stay-place clustering. First, this approach estimates the speed status of each time-stamped location in each trajectory. Then, it extracts the stay places of the trajectory, each of which is denoted as a seven-tuple containing information such as starting and ending time, central coordinate, average direction difference, and so on. Third, the time-stamped locations included in stay places are partitioned into different stay-place equivalence classes according to the timestamps. Finally, stay places in each equivalence class are clustered to mine the congestion locations of multiple trajectories at a certain period of time. Visual representation and experimental results on real-life cab trajectory datasets show that the proposed approach is suitable for the detection of congestion locations at different timestamps.