National Center for Sustainable Transportation

Nowadays, the effectiveness of any smart transportation management or control strategy would heavily depend on reliable traffic data collected by sensors. Two problems regarding sensor data quality have received attention: first, the problem of identifying malfunctioning sensors; second, reconstruction of traffic flow. Most existing studies concerned about identifying completely malfunctioning sensors whose data should be discarded. This project focuses on the problem of error detection and data recovery of partially malfunctioning sensors that could provide valuable information. By integrating a sensor measurement error model and a transportation network model, the authors propose a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) based estimation approach to determine the parameters of systematic and random errors of traffic sensors in a road network. The proposed method allows flexible data aggregation that ameliorates identification and accuracy. The estimates regarding both systematic and random errors are utilized to conduct hypothesis test on sensor health and to estimate true traffic flows with observed counts. The results of three network examples with different scales demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method in a large variety of scenarios. This research improves fundamental knowledge on transportation data analytics as well as the effective management of data and information infrastructure in transportation practice.

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