Arterial Data Acquisition and Network-Wide Travel Time Estimation

Principal Investigator:

Gary Davis, Professor, Civil Engineering

Co-Investigator:

John Hourdos, Director, Minnesota Traffic Observatory

Sponsor:

Minnesota Department of Transportation

Status:

Active

Project Summary:

This research is a continuation of a previously funded project on arterial travel-time estimation. In Phase I, a suite of link-performance functions based on demand flow, traffic control, and geometric characteristics was developed and evaluated; the goal was to produce plausible default estimates of travel times when given predicted flows. The expectation was that these estimates could be updated where and when field measurements are available. In Phase II, field measurement data such as traffic volumes, speeds, and traffic control plans will be acquired and a relational database integrating appropriate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capabilities will be constructed. The primary objectives of Phase II are to compute default estimates of arterial travel times on all Twin Cities arterial links by applying the methods developed in Phase I, to update these default estimates using the collected traffic data, and to incorporate these data into the database. Considering the correlation among network links, the travel time update with the link performance functions is non-trivial and the methodology needs to be designed carefully. The final product of this project will be a database of arterial link travel times on the Twin Cities network for the years 1995 and 2005.