Abstract
Accurate estimation of urban travel times is a key to a successful implementation of intelligent traffic and travel information systems. Traditional survey-based travel time estimations is both expensive and inefficient and in practice is limited to off-line traffic analysis. With the development and installation of Traffic Control Systems collecting real-time traffic measurements, it has become possible to carry out travel time estimations in real-time. Most of the systems, due to economical reasons, utilise single-loop detectors. It is known, that single loop detectors are incapable of accurate spot speeds estimation due to their physical limitations. Therefore, much effort has been put into investigation and development of methodologies of travel time estimation that rely only on occupancy measurements. Unfortunately, most of the methods have been developed for highway traffic and strongly rely on some assumption, which make them inapplicable in urban traffic situation. In this paper, we develop a novel methodology, which is free from the disadvantages of treeway traffic estimation methods. The method has been shown to be successful in the application to urban links travel time estimation problem.
