An ITS Success Story: Review of Application of GPS Equipped Floating Vehicles inthe Last Decade

Today GPS equipped floating vehicles, also called probe vehicles, are widely used to collect real-time and historical travel time data, to identify congestion and to evaluate overall performance of the road network. The floating vehicles provide information for traffic management, transport planning and navigation. With fast increase of GPS-based vehicle navigation devices and tracking systems, various types of vehicles, such as taxis, buses, trucks and private cars, are used as floating vehicles to collect data. Existing systems have vehicle numbers ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousand. There is substantial research into relations between sample size of floating vehicles and accuracy of measurement. This article reviews research, development and applications of floating vehicles since 2000, and summarises achievements and the contribution of floating vehicle data application to ITS development in the last decade.