Estimation of Queue Lengths, Probe Vehicle Penetration Rates, and Traffic Volumes at Signalized Intersections using Probe Vehicle Trajectories

Abstract

With the development of connected vehicle technologies and the emergence of e-hailing services, a vast amount of vehicle trajectory data is being collected every day. This massive amount of trajectory data could provide a new perspective for sensing, diagnosing, and optimizing transportation networks. There has been some literature estimating traffic volumes and queue lengths at intersections using the data collected from these probe vehicles. Nevertheless, some of the existing methods only work when the penetration rate of the probe vehicles is high enough. Some other methods require two critical inputs, the distribution of the queue lengths and the penetration rate of the probe vehicles. However, these two inputs might vary a lot both spatially and temporally and are not usually known in the real world. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a novel method for the estimation of queue lengths, probe vehicle penetration rates, and traffic volumes at signalized intersections. The key step is to estimate the penetration rate of the probe vehicles from the distribution of their stopping positions at the intersections. Then, scaling up the number of probe vehicles in the queues and in the traffic according to the estimated penetration rate will give an estimate of the total queue length and the total traffic volume, respectively. The proposed method has been validated by both simulation data and real-field data. The testing results have shown that the method is ready for large-scale real-field applications.