Abstract
Traditional probe vehicle data collection system uses OBU (On Board Units) to receive positioning data. It requires complicated data filtering, map matching and calculation in the back-end system. When the number of probe vehicles increases, sending, collecting and analyzing the huge data becomes costly, complicated and time-consuming. To resolve this problem, a Virtual Vehicle Detector (VVD) system with a method to set up VVD on road network is proposed. The idea of VVD system was that if road users had OBU, traffic control centers would be able to send a preplanned VVD data structure to the OBU and efficiently collect data by the triggering software. Results of a field test on the Taiwan highway No. 1 show that the proposed VVD mechanism is able to help accurately trigger positioning records. This could simplify the process of back-end data analysis, and reach the goal of efficiently collecting travel time and traffic volume.
