Estimating Road Traffic Congestion using Cell Dwell Time with Simple Threshold and Fuzzy Logic Techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we studied the relationship between Cell Dwell Time (CDT) and the degree of road traffic congestion. CDT is the duration that a mobile phone remains associated with a base station. As the mobile phone in a vehicle travels along a road and encounters different degrees of congestion, the value of CDT varies accordingly. Intutively, the higher value of CDT indicates the worse degree of congestion. This study investigated ways to estimate the degree of road traffic congestion based on measurements of CDT taken from major traffic routes in the metropolitan area of Bangkok, Thailand. We classifed measurements of CDT into three levels of traffic congestion based on duration using two techniques -simple threshold and fuzzy logic, and verified the results with human observations of traffic conditions. The results suggested that the duration of CDT can be used to estimate the degree of congestion with accuracy level upto 85%, which is comparable to a similar technique used to estimate the degree of congestion based on velocity. This suggested a potential use of CDT as traffic probe data.

Efficient traffic congestion estimation using multiple spatio-temporal properties

“…We choose two baseline methods for traffic CE: Density Clustering Estimation (DCE) [9]: DCE only uses density to evaluate a section's congestion. It is the most common estimation method in real application.…”

“…H. Yue et al [7] apply Linear Constraint Databases to forecast speed of traffic, Pattara-atikom et al [8] divided the traffic congestion into three levels, and estimated the road traffic congestion using the weighted averages of measured GPS speed. Furthermore, in the paper [9], they studied the relationship between the value of Cell Dwell Time (CDT) to describe road traffic congestion. Instead of using an equal weight for all records [10], Zhang et al [11] proposed a novel method to reasonably process GPS data by increasing weights of recent records and high velocity to estimate the traffic states.…”

Real time traffic congestion detection system

“…Numerous other researchers have used the mobile cell information to detect traffic congestions in certain areas. W. Pattara-atiko et al [5] used Cell Dwell Time (CDT) to detect congestions, with higher CDT values indicating worse congestions. Chang Ande et al [6] estimated traffic congestion using GPS data equipped in a floating car by calculating the link average speed which may give information about congestions on roads.…”

“…Many methods have been initiated for the detection of road congestions [1] - [5]. By comparing vehicles density in the road with a certain threshold value could be a very successful method.…”

Traffic Density Estimation Protocol Using Vehicular Networks

“…al. [18] exploit the cellular technology and use Cell Dwell Time (CDT) to determine the congestion. If a mobile cell has larger CDT the longer the vehicle remains in contact with one base station and the higher is the probability of congestion.…”