City-wide Probe-based Study of Traffic Variability

Computing efficient traffic signal plans is often based on the amount of traffic in an intersection, its distribution over the various intersection movements and hours as well as on performance metrics such as traffic delay. In their simple and typical form plans are fixed in the same hour over weekdays. This allows low operation costs without the necessity for traffic detection and monitoring tools. A critical factor on the potential efficiency of such plans is the similarity of traffic patterns over the days along each of the intersection movements. We refer to such similarity as the traffic stability of the intersection and define simple metrics to measure it based on traffic volume and traffic delay. In this paper, we propose an automatic probe data based method, for city-wide estimation of traffic stability. We discuss how such measures can be used for signal planning such as in selecting plan resolution or as an indication as which intersections can benefit from dynamic but expensive traffic detection tools. We also identify events of major changes in traffic characteristics of an intersection. We demonstrate the framework by using real traffic statistics to study the traffic stability in the city of Haifa along its 162 intersections. We study the impact of the time of day on the stability, detect major changes in traffic and find intersections with high and low stability.

• Data Mining and Modeling