Evaluation of travel time estimation based on LWR-v and CTM-v: A case study in Stockholm

Real-time estimations of current and future traffic states are an essential part of traffic management and traffic information systems. Within the Mobile Millennium project considerable effort has been invested in the research and development of a real-time estimation system that can fuse several sources of data collected in California. During the past year this system has been adapted to also handle traffic data collected in Stockholm. This paper provides an overview of the model used for highways and presents results from an initial evaluation of the system. As part of the evaluation process, GPS data collected in an earlier field-test and estimations generated by the existing system used by the TMC in Stockholm, are compared with the estimations generated by the Mobile Millennium system. Given that the Mobile Millennium Stockholm system has not undergone any calibration, the results from the evaluation are considered promising. The estimated travel times correspond well to those measured in the field test. Furthermore, the estimations generated by the Mobile Millennium system can be regarded as superior to those of existing traffic management system in Stockholm. The highway model was found to perform well even with a reduction in the number of sensors providing data. The findings of this study indicate the robustness of the Mobile Millennium system and demonstrate how the system can be migrated to other geographical areas with similar sources of available data.