Sebastien Blandin

An ensemble Kalman filtering approach to highway traffic estimation using GPS enabled mobile devices

Traffic state estimation is a challenging problem for the transportation community due to the limited deployment of sensing infrastructure. However, recent trends in the mobile phone industry suggest that GPS equipped devices will become standard in the next few years. Leveraging these GPS equipped devices as traffic sensors will fundamentally change the type and the quality of traffic data collected on large scales in the near future. New traffic models and data assimilation algorithms must be developed to efficiently transform this data into usable traffic information. In this work, we introduce a new partial differential equation (PDE) based on the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards PDE, which serves as a flow model for velocity. We formulate a Godunov discretization scheme to cast the PDE into a Velocity Cell Transmission Model (CTM-v), which is a nonlinear dynamical system with a time varying observation matrix. The Ensemble Kalman Filtering (EnKF) technique is applied to the CTM- v to estimate the velocity field on the highway using data obtained from GPS devices, and the method is illustrated in microsimulation on a fully calibrated model of I880 in California. Experimental validation is performed through the unprecedented 100-vehicle Mobile Century experiment, which used a novel privacy-preserving traffic monitoring system to collect GPS cell phone data specifically for this research.

A General Phase Transition Model for Vehicular Traffic

An extension of the Colombo phase transition model is proposed. The congestion phase is described by a two-dimensional zone defined around an equilibrium flux known as the classical fundamental diagram. General criteria to build such a set-valued fundamental diagram are enumerated, and instantiated on several equilibrium fluxes with different concavity properties. The solution of the Riemann problem in the presence of phase transitions is obtained through the construction of a Riemann solver, which enables the definition of the solution of the Cauchy problem using wavefront tracking. The free-flow phase is described using a Newell-Daganzo fundamental diagram, which allows for a more tractable definition of phase transition compared to the original Colombo phase transition model. The accuracy of the numerical solution obtained by a modified Godunov scheme is assessed on benchmark scenarios for the different flux functions constructed.

Well-posedness of a conservation law with non-local flux arising in traffic flow modeling

We prove the well-posedness of entropy weak solutions of a scalar conservation law with non-local flux arising in traffic flow modeling. The result is obtained providing accurate

Speedup Techniques for the Stochastic on-time Arrival Problem

\mathbf {L^\infty }

An adaptive routing system for location-aware mobile devices on the road network

L∞, BV and

Kernel regression for travel time estimation via convex optimization

\mathbf {L^1}