Mobile Probe Data and its Processing in a Real Time System

Mobile devices are in wide-spread use, communication costs and prices for global positioning system (GPS) receivers have dropped to affordable amounts. These are perfect conditions for floating car data (FCD) technologies to emerge. The “crowd sourcing” model effectively shifts investments to the private community of users who are interested in receiving valuable information. In contrast to more traditional means of traffic measurements, infrastructure costs for traffic data management are low: For the price of a single detector one can deploy a complete FCD processing system. Thus FCD becomes a cheap alternative to automatically detect incidents, derive traffic state information and generate traffic messages for traffic management purposes and driver information systems. Such a real time system was implemented and installed in France using a fleet of more than 150.000 vehicles generating about 20.000 sets of raw data per minute during peak hours.