Freeway travel speed calculation model based on ETC transaction data

Real-time traffic flow operation condition of freeway gradually becomes the critical information for the freeway users and managers. In fact, electronic toll collection (ETC) transaction data effectively records operational information of vehicles on freeway, which provides a new method to estimate the travel speed of freeway. First, the paper analyzed the structure of ETC transaction data and presented the data preprocess procedure. Then, a dual-level travel speed calculation model was established under different levels of sample sizes. In order to ensure a sufficient sample size, ETC data of different enter-leave toll plazas pairs which contain more than one road segment were used to calculate the travel speed of every road segment. The reduction coefficient α and reliable weight θ for sample vehicle speed were introduced in the model. Finally, the model was verified by the special designed field experiments which were conducted on several freeways in Beijing at different time periods. The experiments results demonstrated that the average relative error was about 6.5% which means that the freeway travel speed could be estimated by the proposed model accurately. The proposed model is helpful to promote the level of the freeway operation monitoring and the freeway management, as well as to provide useful information for the freeway travelers.