Cooperative estimation of vehicular traffic using mobile applications

The increasing amount of vehicles in developing countries, where its cities do not have a well-planned road infrastructure nor installed technology to monitor traffic conditions, tends to make difficult the daily traffic and to reduce the quality of life. Because of this, collect and analyze traffic information in an inexpensive and easy manner becomes necessary. This paper presents the implementation details of a system called Autotracks, which collects information from vehicular traffic through mobile devices in order to approximate the traffic conditions in real time. A Floating Car Data approach is used in combination with activity recognition to monitor the location of users in moving vehicles. The real path of the vehicles is approximated by using a Map Matching process. Then, all the trajectories are aggregated in order to approximate the traffic condition in the last period of time and finally the traffic status information in real time is obtained.