Evaluating and Diagnosing Road Intersection Operation Performance Using Floating Car Data

Urban road intersections play an important role in deciding the total travel time and the overall travel efficiency. In this paper, an innovative traffic grid model has been proposed, which evaluates and diagnoses the traffic status and the time delay at intersections across whole urban road networks. This method is grounded on a massive amount of floating car data sampled at a rate of 3 s, and it is composed of three major parts. (1) A grid model is built to transform intersections into discrete cells, and the floating car data are matched to the grids through a simple assignment process. (2) Based on the grid model, a set of key traffic parameters (e.g., the total time delay of all the directions of the intersection and the average speed of each direction) is derived. (3) Using these parameters, intersections are evaluated and the ones with the longest traffic delays are identified. The obtained intersections are further examined in terms of the traffic flow ratio and the green time ratio as well as the difference between these two variables. Using the central area of Beijing as the case study, the potential and feasibility of the proposed method are demonstrated and the unreasonable signal timing phases are detected. The developed method can be easily transferred to other cities, making it a useful and practical tool for traffic managers to evaluate and diagnose urban signal intersections as well as to design optimal measures for reducing traffic delay and increase operation efficiency at the intersections.