Abstract
Traffic information from probe vehicles has great potential for improving the estimation accuracy of traffic situations, especially where no traffic detector is installed. A method for dealing with probe data along with conventional detector data is proposed in this paper. The probe data was integrated into the observation equation of the Kalman filter, in which state equations are represented by a macroscopic traffic flow model. The method was tested under several types of traffic conditions based on hypothetical data, giving considerably improved estimation results compared to those estimated without probe data. The effect of the percentage of probe vehicle deployment in a road network was also quantitatively assessed.
