Intersection delay estimation from floating car data via principal curves： a case study on Beijing＇s road network

It is a pressing task to estimate the real-time travel time on road networks reliably in big cities, even though floating car data has been widely used to reflect the real traffic. Currently floating car data are mainly used to estimate the real-time traffic conditions on road segments, and has done little for turn delay estimation. However, turn delays on road intersections contribute significantly to the overall travel time on road networks in modem cities. In this paper, we present a technical framework to calculate the turn delays on road networks with float car data. First, the original floating car data collected with GPS equipped taxies was cleaned and matched to a street map with a distributed system based on Hadoop and MongoDB. Secondly, the refined trajectory data set was distributed among 96 time intervals （from 0：00 to 23： 59）. All of the intersections where the trajectories passed were connected with the trajectory segments, and constituted an experiment sample, while the intersections on arterial streets were specially selected to form another experiment sample. Thirdly, a principal curve-based algorithm was presented to estimate the turn delays at the given intersections. The algorithm argued is not only statistically fitted the real traffic conditions, but also is insensitive to data sparseness and missing data problems, which currently are almost inevitable with the widely used floating car data collecting technology. We adopted the floating car data collected from March to June in Beijing city in 2011, which contains more than 2.6 million trajectories generated from about 20000 GPS-equipped taxicabs and accounts for about 600 GB in data volume. The result shows the principal curve based algorithm we presented takes precedence over traditional methods, such as mean and median based approaches, and holds a higher estimation accuracy （about 10%-15% higher in RMSE）, as well as reflecting the changing trend of traffic congestion. With the estimation result for the travel delay at intersections, we analyzed the spatio-temporal distribution of turn delays in three time scenarios （0： 00-0： 15, 8： 15-8：30 and 12： 00-12： 15）. It indicates that during one＇s single trip in Beijing, average 60% of the travel time on the road networks is wasted on the intersections, and this situation is even worse in daytime. Although the 400 main intersections take only 2.7% of all the intersections, they occupy about 18% travel time.

Optimization method for evacuation zone with network reconfiguration based on dynamic simulation

Abstract： With a determinate danger zone and evacuation demand caused by an emergency, an optimization method for the evacuation zone with network reconfiguration based on dynamic simulation is proposed. The method contains three modules. First, the network in the evacuation zone is optimized by a model with the integrated strategy of lane reversal and intersection conflict elimination. Secondly, the dynamic evacuation simulation model based on the cell transmission model is applied to simulate the dynamic propagation process of evacuated vehicles in the network in the evacuation zone. The evacuation time for all evacuated vehicles leaving the danger zone is obtained and the setting of the current evacuation zone is fed back. Thirdly, the arrival distributions of evacuated vehicles at critical intersections of the evacuation zone are also obtained to estimate the delay at critical intersection to determine whether the intersection should be taken as the critical intersection in the next iteration. The evacuation zone is expanded gradually through iteration, and the reasonable evacuation zone and the optimal evacuation network is confirmed. Based on the survey of the parking lot and urban street network around Nanjing Olympic Sports Center, the models and the iterative algorithm were applied to obtain the optimal plan of the evacuation zone with network reconfiguration in an evacuation situation to verify the validity of the proposed method.