Identification of freeway macroscopic models using information from mobile phones

A method for the identification of a freeway macroscopic model is presented. The model is based on the idea of dividing a freeway trunk in sections covered by the cells of the wireless network and associated with state variables describing density of vehicles, mean velocity, and percentage of active mobile phones. Using the density and hand-off measurements from the cellular network, the parameters of such model are identified via an algorithm based on stochastic approximation. Successful simulation results are reported and discussed