The use of traffic data from automatic monitoring systems to obtain day-to-day time series of vehicle traffic volumes and origin-destination flows in urban networks

Abstract

The understanding of travel pattern dynamics in the urban environment is essential for the transportation systems planning and operation. Recently, the increasing availability of massive traffic data from traffic monitoring systems, including automatic number plate recognition systems (TMS-ANPR), can allow an understanding of the day-to-day variability of traffic flows in large urban network systems. However, to enhance the data quality for analysis, it is essential to carry out a previous data treatment. This work pre-sents a method for treatment of TMS-ANPR data. The main product of this data treat-ment are the day-to-day time series of traffic volumes and OD flows for different periods of a typical day, allowing the analysis of the multiday dynamic of travel behavior and of the model assumptions stated in the literature about such dynamic behavior. The proposed method, which can be applied to any type of TMS-ANPR, was applied to generate time series data from the TMS-ANPR of Fortaleza city, contributing to identify suspicious and atypical data, to define representative patterns of vehicular traffic and to estimate series of OD flows.